Traversing the Clay-Bearing Unit Along the Base of VRR, Site 73-79, sol 2297-2695, 22 Jan 2019-3 Mar 2020 Options

[djellison]

If you do a row of shots from bottom to top - the little blast from each set of shots in turn scatters some grains back over the previous hole - leaving a little trench. The last hole doesn't get covered over.

[jccwrt]

Lots of cirrus-y looking clouds drifting over on the evening of Sol 2400:

[neo56]

A new selfie is coming, here is a mosaic of the first 41 pictures. Nice to see the two drillholes near the wheels!

[PaulH51]

Gotta love them selfies
Meanwhile another lovely set of clouds to the NNE on sol 2405
Edit: I corrected the sequence order and added timestamps, may be a tad slow to load due to file size

[fredk]

It is a really nice sequence. You can see the clouds getting blurred towards the end (and the hot pixels increase) as presumably the exposures lengthened. (The latest frames chronologically are at the start of your animation, Paul.)

[PaulH51]

It is a really nice sequence. You can see the clouds getting blurred towards the end (and the hot pixels increase) as presumably the exposures lengthened. (The latest frames chronologically are at the start of your animation, Paul.)

Yeah I'm going to be making a new one, I rush the assembly and put them in the wrong order, only realised I'd goof'ed when I saw another version of twitter with the clouds heading in the correct direction... :-(
Edit modified my earlier (hopefully it's correct now)

[djellison]

I’ll double check the exposure times when I get in to work tomorrow.....the last one we did a few sols ago they were 12 seconds or so. This time the images had a ‘wait’ between frames - but these could be several tens of seconds or longer.

They’re incredible. I’m sure Mark L and I will be conspiring to do more of these in the coming months.....I have ideas

[jccwrt]

Here is my take on the Sol 2405 cloud movie. For this (and the previous movie I posted a few days ago) I applied a high-pass filter to enhance the clouds relative to the background sky. For this movie I also attempted to fix the exposure variation due to how overexposure in some frames effected the histogram stretch that NASA applies to the raw images.

[fredk]

The MSL filename decoding site says the sun was around 10 degrees below the horizon during this sequence. With the visual appearance that suggests the possibility of noctilucent clouds, although the public jpeg stretching makes it hard to know how bright the brightest clouds really are. I don't recall a clear observation of noctilucent clouds from the surface of Mars before...

[jccwrt]

Given how many high altitude haze decks I've seen working with HRSC data, I am not at all surprised at the suggestion of noctilucent clouds. Kind of a wonder that they haven't shown up in previous sunset photos.

[djellison]

The exposure times will end up in the PDS delivery in a few months....but spoiler alert - for the 8 frames..

9.7, 9.8, 11.0, 14.6, 23.0, 35.6, 49.9, 68.8 seconds.

[PaulH51]

9.7, 9.8, 11.0, 14.6, 23.0, 35.6, 49.9, 68.8 seconds.

Thanks for the spoiler Doug, some of those are much longer than I would have guessed.

[jvandriel]

The Navcam L view on Sol 2407.

Jan van Driel

[jccwrt]

Here's another movie of noctilucent clouds, this time on Sol 2407. Movie covers appx. 14 minutes. Not as spectacular as the previous two movies, but still pretty nice. Lots of fine detail and streamers, which IMO look similar to terrestrial noctilucent clouds. Some of the clouds at upper right are starting to dim a little bit, so that'll help work out their altitude.

[Phil Stooke]

This is Jan's new panorama in circular form. Comparison with the last one shows we moved slightly to the northwest to approach the dark drifts. I will update the map tomorrow, it's been a busy day in the Solar System.

Phil