[X] My Assistant

[MERovingian]

We've just got the first color picture from MSL today
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=4282

if I understood it well, this is the first time ever that a real color camera has been sent to the Red planet.

Something is nagging me though, and certainly this is here in UMSF that I will get the correct and definitive answer.
Since the 70s and the Viking missions, there's always been debates about the real color of the surface and skies of Mars. They had indeed come up with funny results during the Viking missions with nearly blue skies!

Then came the MERs, and the pictures were, and still are (go Oppy go!), taken through three filters, and then it's all a question of mixing all this together (by now you must have guessed that I am neither a photographer nor a photoshoper!). But as often seen here on this site, everyone has then hers or his own interpretation when it comes to the final result. I have indeed seen here much better looking Martian pics than on the MER site (sometimes, not always)

All this to say that up until this morning, we weren't 100% sure that what we were seing was the real Mars, in its true colors but a very close aproximation. Correct?

So my question is this: is this picture from MSL the very first one to show us the real Martian colors??

Thanks.

[mcaplinger]

MMM uses plain vanilla JPEG with either 4:4:4 or 4:2:2 chroma subsampling (and grayscale luminance only for the narrowband filters.) The dimensional limits referred to only apply to constraints of image size set by the hardware compressor (and only apply if you want the thumbnail to be exactly 8x smaller with no dropped pixels.)

The main advantage that we have for "true color" is that the Bayer color responses are similar to the eye's, rather than being the square narrowband RGB filters used on MER. In my experience with sunlight illumination you really don't have to do any white balancing and the out-of-camera JPEG color is pretty accurate. See http://www.msss.com/images/science/mastcam...nyona19i_cc.jpg, which was brightened very slightly but looks fairly accurate without any processing.