[X] My Assistant

[ljk4-1]

Jim Bell is coming out with a new book this November titled Postcards from Mars.

The details are here:

http://www.postcardsfrommarsbook.com

The book's subtitle, "The First Photographer on the Red Planet", has me wondering
how that will make all the previous Mars probes feel. Except maybe Mars 3 - there's
just nothing you can do with that image.

[djellison]

Well - Viking 1 and 2 and Pathfinder took pictures...and Sojourner moved and took pictures - but I don't think the title 'photographer' is appropriate for them or their teams. The imagery taken was to document things, to study engineering issues.

I think Jim nails it quite well in the extract..
http://www.postcardsfrommarsbook.com/excerpt.html

Those of us taking photographs with the Mars rovers, on the other hand, have had the luxury of much more time devoted to picture taking, much more bandwidth for sending pictures back to Earth, and better resolution of our cameras compared with that of any previous Mars missions. These advantages have allowed us to not just acquire images, but to take photographs.

I think that's a fair judgement. I think Phoenix may just tip into the 'Photographs' catagory depending on how creative the SSI team get with their kit . Without doubt, MSL and Exomars will be taking photographs.

Look at a Hazcam image of IDD work. That's an image. An amazing image, and inspiring image, a great image...but an image.

Look at the sunset image from near Larrys Lookout. THAT...is a photograph

Doug

[mcaplinger]

Well - Viking 1 and 2 and Pathfinder took pictures...and Sojourner moved and took pictures - but I don't think the title 'photographer' is appropriate for them or their teams.

Not to get bogged down in the semantics, but I disagree. See, for example, Tim Mutch's remark in http://history.nasa.gov/SP-425/ch19.htm about the first Viking panorama:

Figure 31 was the first of the three panoramas to be obtained. The rising Sun backlights the entire scene, sharply delineating drifts of sediment and shadowing a prominent boulder about 2 m across and 9 m from the spacecraft. This is probably the most publicized picture taken during the entire Viking mission. Within a day after it was released it appeared on the front page of virtually every major paper in the United States, and many other papers around the world... The ultimate compliment came from a friend of mine who could look back on a distinguished career as a photographer for Life during the heyday of that magazine. After the picture was first described at a special news conference, he came up and remarked, "That's a good picture." "Of course," I responded, thinking primarily of its technical qualities. "No," he returned. "You don't understand. It's really a good picture."

And yes, if some people are ticked by Jim's glory-hounding, intentional or not, I can't blame them. I already gave him a fair bit of crap for Squyres calling him the "Ansel Adams of the space age".