Festoon bedding can be confidently observed in plan view, imho. The "T" geometry Emily pointed out is, I think, quite diagnostic. But in this case, we can see the "T", and several pretty stupendous examples of nested bedding in ripple troughs. There must be an "official" name for that geometry, but I'll be damned if I can remember it. I've always thought of them as "eye" structures, because the nested beds form elliptical, or eye-shaped patterns when sliced this way.

I agree that all kinds of shapes can be created by differential weathering/erosion in rocks with layers, but it really doesn't appear to me that these particular layers are horizontal/flat. I really thought the fortuitous discovery of this special slice through the bedrock was pretty convincing.

On sol 705 Opportunity took a series of L6 "super res" images of various rocks showing fine layering details; I stacked them, resampled them by a factor of 1.5 and then sharpened them a little using an unsharp mask.

Airbag

Thanks, Airbag. Very nice. I saw those come down and thought, "I should finally try to stack those with Astrostack." It's something I've been meaning to try since the super-res they shot at Burns Cliff. I got busy with other things, as usual, but I did take the time to compare your stacks with the raw individuals, and there is clearly a significant improvement in resolution.

The one thing I don't understand about these things is, why do they always take these sets as subframes? Is it a bandwidth issue, or do they use subframes simply because they are not concerned with the surounding view, or is it something else entirely?

Thanks CosmicRocker; I use RegiStax v3 myself. I suspect the reason these are subframes is for bandwidth reasons, as you wrote. It is just these rocks they are interested in seeing in more detail, and not the soil in between.

It seems to me in this case at least some of these targets were a little too close for the pancam to reach focus, so this might be one way to get a bit more information back. On the other hand, we are using lossy compressed images as a source, so who knows!

Airbag

I love these late evening shots!


(Sol737, L247 filters)

I can see why! I'd love to see a big panorama shot in the evening. I wouldn't like to match the frames of such a pan though, given the rate at which the lighting changes at dawn/dusk...

Nice mosaic
Nico

If you were parked up for say, 50 sols or so, you could take one column every evening...

Oops



Doug

More festoons?
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...6BP2547L7M1.JPG

Hee Hee! Yeah, that one had me forward in my chair! At first hello it looks like a bonanza, but, on closer inspection, I wouldn't bet my canoe on any of it. Some areas I might use the MI on, though.