Remember Red Mars

While Hort is away I think it would be interesting to revisit one of the greatest progressions. Remember how red mars images were? The sky was pink against the red ground. I searched the internet to try and find these images and it is hard to do. NASA has invested in Visine.

Then they went to the red images that looked like images through water. I could not find any of them. Post your best, Red Mars, image here.

I knew this thread would be here one day.

Fred

this is a nice "enhanced orange" version from Viking 2 times:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/hires/vl2_22g144.gif

lets hope the next landers will be outfited with true color cams calibrated and with true color management

Nice image MPJ, orange for sure.

After Viking, butterscotch was the rage from the Pathfinder site.

http://isaac.exploratorium.edu/~pauld/Mars/1viewsurface/marspathaccuratecolor1000.jpeg

This week a newbie ask me if I understand filters. On this forum we are indeed blessed with a great image man. Back in the day he would explain most anything to those that ask and probably still will. So I will say I know a little. I can argue with the best because of some basic simple truths I learned from Hort, not from great knowledge.

That question got me thinking of how far we have come over the last few years. Chatter from Mars forums does register at NASA. They hear us. We see it in the new images We are not bound by scientific method or reputation. I have been on Forms like our buddy Doug and they attack like Piranha . Bad Astronomy Today is just as bad. If you can not prove it do not say it. Not a bad position for those sheep to be in.

That is why we are here in the peaceful little forum. War does erupt when ideologies reach an impasse. That has its on sadness as the players all believe dearly and know one knows for sure. All the greatest have visited here but as they say, “Hell has no fury like a grumpy old man.”

There should be a Mars Rover Blogg Hall of Fame. We should have a place to say thank you to the great ones even if they do not understand or like each other. Just a place to honor those that did battle here.

Not that long ago if you mentioned liquid water you were a woo-woo. Now NASA sees it at -22C. People will argue that the pressure was too low, when no surface pressure has ever been observed below 6.1 mb in the northern hemisphere. I know in my heart I will start a thread one day that says, remember when Mars could not support liquid water?

I may owe an apology to Barsoomer. When I have too much beverage my debate skills go out the window. To follow up there has to be a point were water is no longer water but a water based solution. PP is still the same.

Now the images of Mars are changing. The red Mars is starting to be replaced by natural looking images instead of speculation. Hort does not get into the true color speculation. That does not mean we can not. Post what you think it, “May,” look like.

Fred

We have built in our seeing the traits of accommodating off balanced color. We most all know that well now after all the conversation about the questions of actual colors on Mars. Actual color variance, versus our adaptation to the standard Earth balance of a yellow biased Sun in a water and oxygen dominated world has still left us with an ability to make adapted viewing of the Tungsten world, the Florescent, and the new wacky LED world, and we learn to minimize the inaccuracies of all but the one we were made to see in, that yellow Sodium plasma lamp that heats us overhead.
I use all those color balances each day, and it can be irritating. Hopefully we will be given in the future image viewers with the color card and B&W patches built into the viewers for customizing the color balances of final images after we recieve them.
Once on Mars we may find the seeing directly in the Matrian variation quite a 'headache', and even a real nightmare.

I will start.

Dana , not so much. They want us to think that.

My rationale is a good camera and no hanky panky. A thin atmosphere would give us a dark top. A blue Raleigh scattering with atmospheric tan/yellow dust would cast a green huge. Now did I work in a color lab when I was a young lad, yep. Yellow/tan and blue is greenish.

First image. Old school for sure Viking. Was we right from the start? Yep.

Second image, Keith Laney

Fred

Give an old hippie one song

Fred

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujhdf9_IO4w

Come on boys. They got mud in the artic. We saw mud holes down south. What say you?

Here is an Oddesy image that showed ice and stream.

Get me a fringing bucket. Can you see the Ice forming in the crater? Can you see the steam?

Yea brother, I am a newbie. How far back you want to go?

Fred

Another song

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-g_Y0UCxmg

Now we do love to discus Mars. We are at war.

A tribute to our Anglo Saxon warriors.

Fred

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLcoA8El3mI&feature=PlayList&p=BA41EFE1948FC9D9&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=18

Cold-hearted orb rules the night
Removes the colours from our sight.
Red is grey and yellow, white,
But we decide which is right,
And which is an illusion???

Fred, re 7: Here is another crater "flooded" with (ice-) fog:

unfortunatly the website doesnt quote the source of this but i think its either MGS or Odyssey. The crater is 36 km in diameter the website says.

source: [link]

I would say mars science is maturing these days and the times of mars-color "branding" are over

Who could forget this white ice falling over a cliff

Up here in the NW we get a lot of ice covered cliffs where groundwater seeps out of crevices and is frozen in the winter.

Just thought I would pass on this article. It may be of some interest to those of us who ponder life on Mars and elsewhere

http://www.the-scientist.com/templates/trackable/display/news.jsp?type=news&o_url=news/display/55621&id=55621

Winston

Back to that topic, eh? OK, I'll bite...

Viking was a good start in giving us a look at the surface, and this site:

http://www.astrosurf.com/nunes/explor/explor_vik.htm

is among the best modern presentations of the image data.
I could also cite the Viking and Pathfinder surface color related papers in JGR which appeared in the respective mission summary issues, with different camera types giving similar results for the sky and dust seen from most of the planet. The MERs and Phoenix have built upon, not contradicted, these earlier results. I doubt any such peer reviewed papers would be useful to people who want to see Mars as another Earth. We must learn to see other worlds on their own terms.
What looks 'natural' when evaluating an extraterrestrial scene can be decieving since Earthly examples are the sole basis for common familiarity. While it is true that the human eye does with time largely 'correct' for all but the most extreme colored lighting, such distinct lighting is indeed an attraction of many a scene and trying to capture the visual impression is one of the challenges of color photography, such as the orange sunlight on rocky cliffs just before sunset. A good deal of work has gone into anticipating what the 'visual iumpression' of an average human eye would be on Mars, and distinguishing this from 'neutral' lighting conditions such as on a noon time Earth for studying subtle color differences in the scene.

One of the examples used above of images of the Martian surface used to promote a 'familiar' appearance is based on the preliminary JPEGs from the MER missions so they are useless as starting points for reconstructing what the camera is really telling us.
This is 'old hat' for some but there are always new viewers who deserve an introduction to the subject apart from conspiracy mongering to the effect that NASA is hiding the truth, etc. The quality of the discussion on such things here has suffered in the past, but ignoring one or two other 'contributers' will help.

Don

It might be relatively easy to resolve the question of what color the sky is. Just point the MinTes spectrometer at the sky and quantitatively record the mixture of frequencies and intensities. Then reproduce that mix on Earth and look at it.

Viking 1 sol 35 ( Aug 25, 1976 ) RGB color by Horticolor:

Thought I would try my hand at coloring Viking images from the raw data found on the Mars Archive Page.

You can brouse the images ( 1/4 original size ) from Viking Lander EDR Image Browsers and once you have determined a file name for an image go to the Viking Lander Lander directory for the PDS files.

From there I use the imagej PDS plugin to load the images for processing.

Still waiting for the MER pipes to unclog.

Barsoomer, the basic problem is color is not frequency!

I have no doubts that NASA knows the frequency of the light on Mars to 6 places - but also don't believe that they have a clue about the psychologial observation of color on Mars.

Color is not a simple thing.

For example, I "see" slightly different colors from my left and right eye. So, dear readers, which color perception is "correct"?

Are colors in the dark shade of a bright sunny day "the same" as the colors in the direct sunlight? ( Hint: Yes - even though the light frequencies are not the same! )

Color is a complex multidimensional epiphenomenon best rendered by art - not science.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Hort,

Your 16, wonderful. Now i bet that is what it would look like.

Fred

'For example, I "see" slightly different colors from my left and right eye. So, dear readers, which color perception is "correct"?'

The average, especially when using both. Despite minor variations in average color perception people can generally agree on what colors they see, especially those who deal with color in their professions like photogrophy, printing and artists in general.

'Are colors in the dark shade of a bright sunny day "the same" as the colors in the direct sunlight?'

Both lighting conditions are distinct to the human eye and to photography, ideally both would be distinguishable in a photo carefully prepared by a photographer to match the visual impression.
If one were to make a photo showing incadescent interior lighting seen in an open window of a house whose white exterior is lit blueish with a similar light intensity shortly after sunset cameras would tend to emphasize the real color differences. Both sets of color would have a noticable effect on the color 'cast' when seen by the Human Eye which would be obvious when changing from one to the other, but the eye quickly 'adapts' to each when surrounded by such lighting conditions.
If people ever go to Mars they will be able to look at photos of where they have just been and say 'this looks right' just as we can look at photos from Monument Valley or such and compare it with the real thing we have seen.
Until then we will have to make do with cameras on probes, with proper accounting for the camera characteristics. So far three different kinds of cameras (Viking camera, IMP, and PANCAM) have given similar color results when veiwing similar things (dust, sky, basalt rocks) on Mars, with published values for all three converging nicely.

Don

A decent color balance of a similar scene as on reply 16 can be seen on the site I mentioned above, on this page:

In the case of Viking the neutral gray spacecraft can be used as a color reference, when it looks blue the color balance is too far in that direction. This is seen to an extreme in Anomolist Holger Isenberg's 'blue sky on Mars' images:
[link]

My own work on the subject can be seen here:

[link]