The Martian Sky Options

[Bjorn Jonsson]

I have been attempting to make computer generated images of the Martian atmosphere, both as seen from the surface and from space. To check the results I have been looking for spacecraft images to use as ground truth. I have found lots of images - by far the best ones I have found are from UMSF in this thread: http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=3324

However, I'm always looking for more ;-). So if anyone knows of more and/or better images I'm interested in them. What would be best are mosaics showing the sky from the horizon (with the horizon/surface visible) and towards the zenith.

The sky varies a lot because of variable amount of dust but the general impression I get is that the sky is bright near the horizon (usually brighter than the surface) but gets much darker higher in the sky. There is probably a fairly large, bright area in the sky near the sun, possibly less reddish (lower R/B ratio) than parts of the sky farther from the sun.

I'm already getting fairly interesting results, this one has a field of view of 90 degrees:


(needless to say this one is 'overexposed' near the horizon; dynamic range is sometimes a problem)

The problem is that even though this may not be bad the limb currently appears far too bright as seen from space :



This shows that my atmospheric model is erroneous in some way - I suspect that as seen from the surface the Martian sky is darker high above the horizon than I have been assuming.