[X] My Assistant

[azstrummer]

Ok, was thumbing through my myriad of old images today and noticed something about views back towards Spirit's landing site taken from high on the hills. Generally, the pans are taken at the end of each SOL and the sun is setting in that direction, giving a really washed out look to the valley below.

My imagination kicked in, especially seeing all the animated GIF's people have been posting recently, and had this wonderful thought. Some day when Spirit is doing some in place rock work and not moving for the entire sol, wouldn't it be wonderful if they'd do a series of pans of the valley below at regular intervals, let's say every 10 minutes. An animated GIF put together of that view would give this spellbinding scene of the shadows of the day arching across the hills and craters much as time lapse photography does of sunsets and cloud movements on Earth. It would be a great tool for picking out features on the valley as well. The flat scenes we're seeing are extremely difficult to use to pick out something such as craters the rover visited. The moving shadows would point them out clearly.

If the pan were limited in degree shown and the Navcam used it should keep the file sizes down to a manageable level I'd think. If the images used too much bandwidth, they could simply lengthen the time intervals between the pans.

[centsworth_II]

From where it is now - the sun sets on a bearing off towards the end of west spur and the landing site

Doug

Yikes! I guess not being there is no excuse for getting east and west mixed up!