From the Planetary Society article that Bobby posted in this thread:

"The first phase of the winter campaign consists of two sets of activities: one is acquiring what's probably going to be the biggest panorama we've ever done, the McMurdo pan. That's going to be all 13 filters -- all the colors we've got -- and for a number of filters it will be uncompressed data, so it'll be extremely high resolution." The mosaiced panorama will ultimately be comprised of some 1500 images that will take weeks to acquire and weeks to dowload, he added, "but it's going to be a really remarkable dataset."




Wow. Anyone happen to have a PC with quad-processors and about 16GB of RAM?


And yet again, it's another "for my next trick" moment - 8 months of science ahead. That's about 2.5 original-missions long.
Psh, 90 sols. Yeah, we can do that, no problem.

I think 1500 images in 13 filters, that's 115 pointings. The Lion King pan was 93 pointings - so there's an extra 22 frames in there somewhere.

Doug

Rover's probably checking it's belly button for belly button lint.

I suppose you could add in calib-target images into the equation - that would add a lot of images to it

Doug

It would also be neat to do a sequence like Pathfinder's super-pan, in which images are intentionally taken with the same filter at slighty different pointings. That would definitely be a good project if either rover becomes permanently stuck but still has a working pancam.

I seems on the contrary. The rightmost picture (sol 820) is cleaner than the rest. The hint is you the two black circles on the rightmost and upper of the picture of sol 820 is clearer (less dust) than the ones of sol 760 and slight more dusted than the sol 790).

On the other hand, when I saw a MOLA picture of high resolution around Gusev crater, the basin of Hills McCool and Husband is somewhat less darker than the around (north west and south west) due to greater intensity of activity of Dust Devils. However, the other hints is that the network forms of ripples on the south slope of Hill Columbia, El Dorado, shows that the wind pattern around the Basin is not a typical gustty but somewhat disturbance in all directions. The surface has soft marks of direction of winds. At all, the site where Spirit sits has very little winds. She must get out of this site to a plain land, on the southtern side, it will get more winds to clean its solar arrays.

Rodolfo

Here is my own interpretation of sol 813 late afternoon colors by creating a synthetic green filter fusing the iR and blue channels. Then I averaged the sky to better show its gradual darkening : the colors are the real ones ! (file reduced to fit in the Forum)
Enjoy !

... PLUS the wallpaper versions (1280x1024 and 1440x900 pixels) !
Enjoy !

Thanks Olivier, STUNNING images, as usual! Spooky timing because I was just leafing through "VISIONS OF MARS" again today, losing myself all over again in those gorgeous landscapes...

Wish I could do that, create beautiful landscapes out of the raw images, but I can't. Instead I can only write about it, so, to say thank you to you, dilo, Astro0, Nirgal and all the other ImageMages who live here, I thought you deserved your own tale...

The Spirit Lingers

Hi Stu! (waves) great story, as usual, but still an adventure to read...

Cool stuff Olivier Gotta love the colors!

Nico

I've started to work on the McMurdo pan...

Here are the 28 pointings (7 columns) taken so far (upto tosol, 827) in L7.



Half & quarter resolution versions on my website (click image)

James

If my figures are correct, this means about 8 steradians coverage (assuming 10% linear overlap between PanCam frames)... this is a huge solid angle, almost 2/3 of a sphere and probably they will image a smaller portion, with some superres as suggested by tedstryk.
Consider also that most filters belongs to a single camera (left or right) and this will make very hard to match all views (assuming you want do this).

And here is a rough version of the 14 frames that are down (nearly) completely in L234567:



Again, half & quarter resolution versions on my website (click image)

This is the first time i've used the full L234567 and I've essentially mixed different filters to get RGB in a pretty random way (a little of this, a bit more of that). If anyone has any better idea of approximately what proportions of each I should be using, I'd love to here it.

Cheers,

James

Very nice.

This is going to be one heck of a panorama.

And here's to hoping for another hell of a victorious panorama from the other side of the planet.



Edit: Wow, in that color image, Spirit looks to have a ghastly amount of dust on those panels. Here's hoping for a good dust devil cleaning.
*Ducks as Doug violently swings a vacuum cleaner at my head.*


Speaking of dust. I just had a thought - might it have been better for Spirit to remain on a northward sloping side of Home Plate? I don't recall there being a whole lot of dust deposition there, and some of those slopes looked like they endured constant wind erosion. Now looking around, there are wispy sand ripples. I'm just wondering if one of those sides of Home Plate would have been better for cleaning winds, rather than where Spirit's at now, which might actually be a place for dust deposition.

Interesting new release
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/pre.../20060501a.html
or
http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_.../low_ridge.html

Notice how the JPG'ing of the raw releases don't retain the same level of detail as calibrated data... tracks visible in the proper release, but just not quite there in the JPGs

Doug