[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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[Bubbinski]

Thanks for the link to lyle.org - I look forward to seeing more images there as they're calibrated.

I'm also curious as to what the night sky would look like and how the stars and planets would look from Mars. I assume that the night sky would look the same as on earth, as there'd be no light to illuminate the atmospheric dust. When Spirit took its images of Earth in the night sky near Bonneville crater on or about Sol 66(?) I had hoped to see a color image, but alas the image was from the Navcam. (Was the scene simply too dark for the Pancam?). Anyway, tonight I fiddled around with the image in Paint Shop Pro 7 and changed the histogram to Red 44, Green 54, Blue 94 just because it looked to me like a night sky should (totally unscientific), and I colored in the dot representing earth with what looked like a good shade of blue-green to me. (Again, a SWAG).

Here it is, a colorized image of Earth taken from Mars by Spirit. Does it look plausible?

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