[X] My Assistant

[Nirgal]

among the many new pancams at exploratorium there seem to be interesting
images showing what must be clouds, clearly defined as never seen before
at the Gusev site.

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/pa...HEP2680L7M1.JPG

Interestingly, those are high-res pancam multi-filter sequences.

Questin for Dan (slinted) refering to our recent discussion about sky color:
would't this be wotrth a try to do interesting sky color composites.
Maybe you could use the brightest pixels
in the clouds as a white point reference ?

[ilbasso]

The other cool thing is that Earth's Moon would be visible as a naked eye object from Mars. Today from Gusev, the Earth is magnitude -2.73 (as bright as Jupiter is here right now), and the Moon would be seen as a magnitude 1.3 'star' about 5.5 minutes of arc from the Earth, or about 1/6th the diameter of the full Moon as seen from Earth.

In a telescope, the Earth would be a crescent about 14" of arc in diameter. With small amateur telescopes, you would just barely be able to make out the Moon as anything other than a point of light.

[David]

There's no point in sending probes to Earth -- everybody knows that with the runaway greenhouse effect of its thick atmosphere, the surface is far too hot for life to develop. Three quarters of its surface is covered with noxious molten water, and showers of molten water precipitate over most of the surface area, effectively sterilizing the solid areas. If life on Earth were even remotely possible, you'd have to look for it on the relatively hospitable (if scorchingly hot) southern polar cap.