Finishing work in and around Seitah, sols 238-378 Options

[Phil Stooke]

It's time to start a new thread - this will cover the remaining work in Seitah and the drive back to the landing site.

Phil

[tau]

... One thing I notice in your processing of these photos in this area is that their top "airfall coating" is very light, almost white in IR. It'll be interesting to look at that chemistry. ...

The "top airfall coating" is most likely orange-brown dust, and it appears featureless white or very bright in my images due to clipped highlights in the Mastcam-Z raw images that I used.
This clipping exists in all Mastcam-Z gray-scale raw images of filters 1 to 6 and in the red channel of filter 0 (RGB), where the clipped areas have the value 254.
The "raw images" are obviously not raw in the sense of digital photography, where "raw" means straight out of the camera and not jpeg-ed.
Because calibrated images from sol 364 are not yet available, here is an example from Sol 69 with the upper part of Kodiak hill:

1. Mastcam-Z right eye filter 1 (infrared) image from NASA's "Raw Images" site (link), with 8 bit per pixel, no details visible in the brightest part
2. Same as 1, all pixels with a value 254 are marked red
3. Calibrated image from the Planetary Data System Imaging Node with 16 bit per pixel, (link)
4. Same as 3, brightness adjusted
5. Same as 3, histogram adjusted to show the details in the brightest part on top of Kodiak hill

[mcaplinger]

The "raw images" are obviously not raw in the sense of digital photography, where "raw" means straight out of the camera and not jpeg-ed.

Agreed that "raw images" is something of a misnomer, but I'm not sure what you show has anything to do with JPEG. It's not uncommon for MCZ images to be sent with only lossless compression, which is as raw as it comes. I think the saturation problem you show is more due to the images having been stretched/contrast-enhanced. The vast majority of MCZ images are autoexposed and really shouldn't need to be stretched, and I have no idea what algorithm the raw image website is using.