[X] My Assistant

[nasaman58]

What I'm about to write could go equally well under the Opportunity section, but I had to put it somewhere. (Doug, maybe this ties to the post I wrote earlier in reply to your reorganization scheme about lumping oppy and spirit together).

Now, onto business...

I'm curious what the whole sky of Mars looks like. Whenever we get color pans, we only see a little strip of the sky (with the nice exception I believe Doug did of the sun above Eagle crater). Sure, the sky looks bright and maybe a tad bluish near the Sun, but what about up high near the zenith but away from the sun? Is it a dark brownish color? Or close to black?

On Sol 178 (July 4 for us Americans )when Spirit was climbing toward West Spur, the PanCam was pointed up, so we got to see some darker, higher altitude sky than we normally see. But I'd like to see basically a whole-sky or near whole-sky "pan" to see the color gradients. Consider this a challenge for you people with the right Photoshop/software hook-ups and mad skillz!

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[Deimos]

I'm curious what the whole sky of Mars looks like. Whenever we get color pans, we only see a little strip of the sky (with the nice exception I believe Doug did of the sun above Eagle crater). Sure, the sky looks bright and maybe a tad bluish near the Sun, but what about up high near the zenith but away from the sun? Is it a dark brownish color? Or close to black?

On Sol 178 (July 4 for us Americans  )when Spirit was climbing toward West Spur, the PanCam was pointed up, so we got to see some darker, higher altitude sky than we normally see. But I'd like to see basically a whole-sky or near whole-sky "pan" to see the color gradients. Consider this a challenge for you people with the right Photoshop/software hook-ups and mad skillz!

There are lots of images. A further challenge would be to compare sol 178-ish with recent images, since there was much less dust way back then. The dust storms hit about sol 350 for Spirit, around our Ney Year. Dust was also high for the 50-100 sols after landing.

[Nirgal]

one problem is that for a reliable "true color" view, only the radiance calibrated composites obtained from the PDS archive should be considered.
(up to sol 180 so far, as of April 22, up to sol 270)
Such as posted, e.g. on http://www.lyle.org/~markoff/

Those pictures actually suggest a pinkish-bluish sky during dust-clear conditions.
At least for the strip of sky relatively near to the horizon.
However, I too have yet to see a real radiance calibrated near-true color
image where the visible strip of sky extends to more than, say 40 degrees above the horizon.

Many Navcam-pictures (due to the wider lens angle) do show considerably more of the sky towards the Zenit: many of them even up to near the "black" region
(and I simply can't belive that, due to the thin atmosphere, the color of the sky *near the Zenit* can't be anything other than nearly black)

The interesting thing would be the color just of the transition/gradient from the
sky to this "black" area.