[X] My Assistant

[Stu]

No. I'm saying that it can't explain the spots which might be appearing quite near to the beacon.
Whatever we see a few pixels to the left/right of the beacon can't be #1 or #3.

Aha, gotcha. Well, my gut is telling me that the beacon is my #1 or #2, probably #1, and that the other bright spots close by are details in base of the feature itself, or or even large, protruding boulders set into the rim. Thinking back to Endurance, there were quite a few chunks of rock embedded in there, weren't there?

[ustrax]

But for the time being I'm with the near rim hypothesis.

By now I'm with you, if we look at this, a part of the beacon is below the near rim line, gap or no gap that is the question, let's see who will be the lord of the rims...

http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b14/ustrax3/beacon4.jpg

[Tman]

So...Don't blow it!
Tesheiner, Sostratus is 'clearly' asking 'how do you do?' on your image...

I blow up damn sure!
Have a look http://www.greuti.ch/oppy/beacon_sol804821.jpg - there's nothing nada beside the "beacon" what you could identify more than a picture artifact...

...want you a big hug instead (or do you NEED one now)?

Note: the upper picture is a cutting from Tim Parker's (JPL) mosaic.

[ustrax]

...want you a big hug instead (or do you NEED one now)?

Not me, but I know of someone who's in need of one...
http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b14/ustrax3/HUG.jpg

In YOUR image nothing seems to appear....That's a fact...But I will insist on my theory...
Hey, I'm ustrax! You know how things work with me!...

http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b14/ustrax3/beacon5.jpg

(BTW, have you seen my new signature?... )

[Tman]

Not me, but I know of someone who's in need of one...

Here on UMSF there's someone for sure

(BTW, have you seen my new signature?... )

Yes, that's a good logo to our pictures, but (where) is it for downloading?

[ustrax]

Yes, that's a good logo to our pictures, but (where) is it for downloading?

I was talking about the sentence down there...

"Some men see things as they are and say why - I dream things that never were and say...it's an abyss!"

And where do you want to put our pictures? My own you can put on a sugar bowl to scare the ants away...

[Phil Stooke]

Finally... I'm back from a trip, where I could read UMSF but I didn't have my beloved Photoshop. At last I can play with the new images. So here is the rim of Victoria (highest parts only so far) - from the most recent images at Exploratorium.

I merged the left and right pancam images to reduce the effects of noise. At this distance there's no problem, only the foreground would be messed up by this process. I applied a ten-times stretch before that merging. You can see the advantage of merging left and right frames if you look at the extreme left and right edges of this image, where there is no overlap so you just have the single frame with its JPEG artifacts.

We start to see real detail on the slopes. I don't show matches to the MOC images here, but more are becoming visible now. One is a tiny crater at the extreme left edge, visible between the dark 'rays' on the north side of Victoria.

Phil

[sranderson]

The more I look at the beacon, the more I realize that it is really disturbingly tall (even in the unstretched view).

It appears to be taller than anything else around it, thus obviating the need for a slot in the near rim to see it. If it is on the far rim, then it is tall enough to show over the near rim. If it is on the near rim, it is the tallest thing on the near rim.

If I could recall the IFOV of the pancam, I could calculate how tall it is.

Scott
.

[Tesheiner]

If I could recall the IFOV of the pancam, I could calculate how tall it is.

IIRC, fov (1024 pixels) = 16 degrees.

[dilo]

Phil, believe or not, I had exactly the same idea (merge left and right image) indipendently from you.
I made it only for the two Sol821 frames containing the beacon (after removing jpeg artifacts too):

I must admit that this feature is really taller (at least 3 pixels) and more structured than before, as already noticed by others.
Not only, there is the impression we start to see some other bright features. Most of them are due to noise (in fact they do not appear in the averaged version) but there are at least two spots that seems real, at the two sides of beacon, as clear in this stretched (5x) version:

I tried to identify them with features already highlighted by Stuart:

IMHO, the beacon (blue line) should be identified to "Pyramid ridge" (Stu number 1) while the East spot seems to match with Sofi Crater rim (3). The west spot identification is less clear and could coincide with nearer structure in the West rimn (first red ellipse from left). There is also an alternative set of identifications (green/purple lines) based on assumption that left spot coincides with "raptor claw" cliffside (2), but is less probable based on previous azimuth/parallax analysis.

This game starts to be very intriguing!

[sranderson]

IIRC, fov (1024 pixels) = 16 degrees.

So the IFOV is 16/1024=0.015625 (deg/pixel), and if we are about 1100 meters from the near rim, and the beacon covers 3 pixels, then the height of the beacon is about 1 meter.

Not as big as I thought.

Scott

[Pando]

Here are two heavily reprocessed images of the beacon, with the top view showing Phil's averaged image above, and the bottom one showing dilo's averaged image (both posted in this page above). Note that the processed images are NOT stretched vertically...

Phil's image above shows an interesting detail - what appears to be a slope to the right of the beacon. I'm not sure if it's an artifact or not since I had to un-stretch Phil's image...

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[dvandorn]

I just have this awful, gnawing feeling that, as we approach, the Beacon is going to resolve out to this:



-the other Doug

[Shaka]

worrywort.

[Stu]

Interesting images Pando! If they're not showing imaging crud, then I think they hint that the Beacon is indeed feature #1 on my previously posted pic, and the bright, smaller feature to its right could be the raised top of the sharktooth promontory to its left on my pic... between the two there's a dark area that might fit the profile of the dark area between the two bright "blips" on that top image.

I know, I know, "hint", "could", "might"... but guessing's fun!