[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.

[JohnVV]

bobby

if you watched the movie "the Martian "

the color is pretty on the spot for the soil and rocks

one of the issues with the MSL chart and the "sun dial" is the dust covers them

[mcaplinger]

if you watched the movie "the Martian "
the color is pretty on the spot for the soil and rocks

Hmmm. Well, perhaps, but if you read http://io9.com/the-best-effects-in-the-mar...nt-s-1734941505

But what does “looked Martian” actually mean? Well, MPC went straight to the source. “We looked at a lot of the NASA photos from the rovers - some of them from Mars - and there are interesting colors you get in there,” he said. “But a lot of the time it just looked like an overcast day in a desert on Earth.” Instead Ridley Scott wanted all different colors in the skies at all different times. “Sometimes more green-ish, sometimes it more like a coppery or bronze-y color and so we just had to figure out what the color was going to be and what the right mood was going to be for Ridley,” Langlands said.

I loved the movie but I'm not sure I'd use it as a model for accurate color. For example, I was unimpressed by the sunsets. Also, "some of them from Mars"?