Crop from PSP001336_1560

Ah, Stu - it must be getting on towards Easter - I'm still thinking "chocolate".

Andy

I'm confused. Boulders or craters? Or both? I can't tell.

http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_006586_1775

New blog online... kind of a gallery of "caught my eye" HiRISE image crops... everyone welcome to come in and browse...

HiRISE Views

Reader Advisory. Stu got broadband.



Doug

Yep, and I'm happier than a dog in a lamp post factory

All of Mars is mine now, MINE I tell you! Mwaaaahaaaaahaaaaa!!!!

Broadband + HiRISE IAS Viewer + 3 days' holiday from work. Priceless.

Something I've been working on many hours.

Stu, you mean you've been 'Mr dial-up' for time immemorial????? you must be the world's most patient man........

Not so much "patient" as "resigned"... downloading a big HiRISE image was a matter of setting it going, then heading out to do some shopping... or go on vacation... or sail around the world... and enjoying it when I got back

But now...

Click to view attachment

Not a pit, but you certainly wouldn't want to fall in here in your fragile space suit now, would you..?

Rubble crater

Some odds and ends after a very enjoyable should-have-been-doing-something-constructive HiRISE IAS viewing session....

Any of our geology-savvy members feel like explaining to me the process going on here, to lead to the formation of almost identical sedimentary layered features in two different but neighbouring craters..?

Big picture

Crater one

Crater two


Also, isn't it great how sometimes an image catches your eye because it reinforces a piece of information you already knew..? I found this HiRISE image, which at first looks like a pretty standard landslide...

Click to view attachment

... then I looked a little more closely and saw the landslide apron itself is pretty heavily cratered... so this must be a reeeeeeeeeeally old landslide, right?


Finally, I can't help wondering what the view would be like for a rover that trundled up to the edge of this valley's cliffs and gazed down...

Stunning place...

Rounded mesa

Posted some new crops on my HiRISE gallery blog, if anyone wants to take a look...

Hi folks, I just went to the NASA MER site and had a look around for some filter L4,L5,L6 frames.
Back in May are the latest I can find, anyway, here is one, Date stamped using MERDAT.



Here is a link to another image a full size 500 kb GIF from the same day of the horizon, with blue sky.

http://www.terranimpact.com/Mars/MER/2P264...2L5M1-Tag01.gif

Bear in mind, the JPG's from the JPL/Exploratorium site are uncalibrated - this rather lengthy issue explains how and why that means something
http://web.archive.org/web/20070702193715/...marscolors.html

Doug

G'day Doug,
thanks for that URL, not seen it before.
I think I was aware of most of that. Good read though.
It was the same Professario as in the article you mentioned, whose kind words of inspiration have kept me plodding away at certain things. I am now looking at a compiler called Lazarus to see if I can get a Mac version to work. Making it all open source is probably the go.
My own interpretation of what is happening is a bit like this.

Bring me back to Earth if you think I'm on Mars somewhere, or if you see me digging a hole for myself, just take the shovel off me and dong me on the head, I'll understand.

If I am looking at a garden across the road with the Sun in my face,
there will be certain colour temperatures and saturations, if I turn around 180 degrees and look at my own garden, it all changes.
Humans take it all in their real time stride and really
don't notice much difference, unless they are paying particular attention to what they are looking at, sorry, seeing.

I understand that the L4, L5 and L6 combinations aren't always the bees knees, but I keep in mind,
my own observations of what I might perceive while just looking around myself in my own environment and how much variation can occur just looking in a different direction can produce.

So, I stick to L4, L5 and L6 for a model of what I might be seeing, keeping in mind the variations I get here on Earth, the same happens everywhere. There is not a huge difference in output between a standard L4, L5, L6 overlay, and a MER2RGB overlay, but sometimes there is.

It's about as close as you can get, without calibrating the images for colour, or if you like, a normal view with natural variations due to angle, intensity, environment. i.e. When the sky turns red, so does much of everything else.

My question though, say during a sunset, when you would expect most things to be taking on a reddish hue, does calibrating the images, attempt to make them more "normal colours" at a benchmark value somewhere, or recreate them to the more accurate levels of everything having a reddish hue, as a human would perceive them there and then at that time?

Basically, I just like seeing what it saw right there and then without any adjustments first.
It is a lot of work to do the calibrating, something my own software is not capable of, all it does is the standard 3 filter overlay with the MER2RGB option if you want it, with sliders for some variation.

Just for something different, I have been using the MERDAT software for looking at the images from the SOHO spaceraft, I download a zip of stills, get into MERDAT and click on the first image, this brings it up full size, I then right click on the image, and the magnifier page appears, and engage slideshow, and the mouse cursor position on the image is displayed as the X Y pixel location along the top with the images X Y dimensions (512x512) in this case. The JAVA tool on the SOHO site doesn't show any data in the JAVA console for me, so, well, this works for me. I thought I could pull it out and make a SOHO locator tool, but hey, that would be like work or something, I'll just multitask with MERDAT.

:-)

I am still interested in including the Phoenix codes into MERDAT, so that it will show data for all 3 spacecraft as you are looking at that image. I was hanging out to see if anyone else has the filename decoding happening yet for Phoenix pics, I've not seen anything yet.

Basically, it is all very interesting fun. I will continue to be amazed at what others have done and are doing, and hopefully learn a bit along the way and then share it.

I find it all very inspirational, and chatting with like minded folks is a bonus.
I blame the Moon landings for this, I still remember looking at the astronauts on the Moon on the TV, and then trotting outside and looking up into the sky at the Moon, thinking, they're up there, then back into the TV.
I think I and the contributors in here will have this bug for life.

All the best Doug, thanking you.

Weird compared to the surrounding smaller craters that appear to impacts.

The thickness of the rims leaps out, rather wide and ancient, cratered and rounded.

What were your thoughts as to them possibly being old volcanic eruption points?

This actually reminds me of seeing mould growing on a wall in damp room.

Yes, a better look would be nice. I can only really think that the topsoil covering a dark underlying material has been removed by some methods, wind and landslide, possibly dune migration??

My thoughts were an impact crater fossil. The original crater has been eroded away and what we can see here is the hardnened shocked, central uplift and ring.

I'll say,

If I read the image correctly, they are lunette dunes with a prevail breeze from the top left, or Nth West of the image. I would expect to see dark material uncovered on the lower flatlands surrounding the dunes. NOT growing on top of them, AHHH.

Hi Stu, I have been into your HiRise gallery, and saw your crops of the craters with the mounds located near the Northern rims.

Stu's crater mounds


Another guess as to what.....

A great flood of water heavily silted with material from a Northerly direction. Like in a gold sluice, material is trapped in the low pressure area behind the wall of the crater. The flood subsided and the craters remained full of ponded water until it evaporated. The score along the top of the mound possibly being caused by, collapse as settling occured. The rings, as the water level dropped.

There is certainly a story being told there, I just don't know if I'm reading it correctly.

And another thought regarding round mesas, I wonder if a lot of them are impact crater fossils, the original crater having long eroded away leaving the hardened shocked ground as a round mesa.
Probably been said before, no soup for me.

Um.
I have an animated gif thats 2.2 megabytes.

I don't think anything at all like this has been posted anywhere before.
I have substantially cleaned up and enhanced, then assembled into an image-registered movie the VEGA-1 flyby images of Halley's Comet.
You can clearly see a sharp limb and the full outline in the few closest-approach low-phase angle image and in one image actually see a cleft or valley that's apparently a real topographic feature that divided the approach high-phase images into two lobes.

How and where's the EASIEST place to post this one over-limit image?

Sample posted:

Why the damn can't I upload a 15 k tif?

-unnecessary quoting removed. Mod.

Hi edstrick, if I can help out.
Email the file to me and I will place it on my website and come back here and post a link to it.
I have two domains, vk3ukf.com and terranimpact.com choose which domain you would prefer.
My email is vk3ukf@hotmail.com.
I am hanging out to see this too.

The other possibility is youtube, but the resolution will be degraded.
Cheers, Kevin.

Most browsers can't view a tif, and I can't imagine any reason to attach a tif over a gif or jpg or png, thus tif's are not in the list of approved attachments ( a narrow list of file extensions that dictate what can and can not be attached)

Doug

[As an aside, tif files can be viewed using Irfanview, a freely downloadable application available here (download.com): ] http://www.download.com/IrfanView/3000-219...cdlPid=10755180

I've sent the file to vk3ukf, so he can post it.

That file has been TRAPPED on a failed hard drive for 5 years. It would spin and was barely accessible with read errors and long system-wait times. It took Media Tool Professional 13 DAYS to reverse clone the 80 gig drive to a spare drive so I could then do file-recovery on the readible sectors. I apparently recovered everything I needed, including family photo scans that had been done 2 years before the drive got sick and were <duh> nowhere backed up.

I've attached most of the closest approach frames, skipping 0064 (previously posted) and two at the beginning and one at the end of this sequence where things had stopped changing fast. You can see a vague albedo feature across the nucleus at low phase, and that cleft/vally/gash across the nucleus (cut off at the bottom of the frame) in 0063. Early and late in the sequence, at high phase angles, the jets off the sun-facing lobe of the nucleus wash everything else out and increasingly obscure the nucleus, so the tail-ward lobe of the nucleus sort of materializes as the spacecraft approaches and starts to swing around to the dayside, then disappears back into the murk on flyout. (Those frames are in the animated gif but not posted here)

-unnecessary quoting removed. Tesheiner.

Hi edstrick and others the file is now online unmolested at the following URL.

http://www.terranimpact.com/vega1-halley.gif

The stills do not do it justice, the detail toward the end shows the shape of Halley and it reminds me of the asteroid that the japanese probe visited.

WOW. blink blink.

Thanks for making your file available ed, Kevin.

Nice! It would be interesting to do some merging of adjacent frames to improve the SNR a bit.

Phil