Beautiful Picture Postcard sent Home From Curiosity Rover

Since Percy arrived on Mars with his fancy toy helicopter Curiosity rover has been feeling a little left out so to give us a nudge she's sent home a stunning postcard of her view from up on Mount Sharp.
The picture is a composite of two images taken by Navcam , one taken in the morning and one in the evening , the image is also false colour.

At the center of the image is the view back down Mount Sharp, the 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain that Curiosity has been driving up since 2014. Rounded hills can be seen in the distance at center-right; Curiosity got a closer view of these back in July, when the rover started to see intriguing changes in the landscape. A field of sand ripples known as the "Sands of Forvie" stretches a quarter- to a half-mile (400 to 800 meters) away.

At the far right of the panorama is the craggy "Rafael Navarro Mountain," named after a Curiosity team scientist who passed away earlier this year. Poking up behind it is the upper part of Mount Sharp, far above the area Curiosity is exploring. Mount Sharp lies inside Gale Crater, a 96-mile-wide (154-kilometer-wide) basin formed by an ancient impact; Gale Crater's distant rim stands 7,500 feet tall (2.3 kilometers), and is visible on the horizon about 18 to 25 miles away (30 to 40 kilometers).
www.jpl.nasa.gov...

If you're using a desktop can confirm it makes a mighty fine background and the 5mb Tiff version is Here if you want to check it out.

Mighty Purdy.

just curious...

why there are 2 hotspots there?
top left= yellow,
top right = blue

I always wondered what this disney version are Nasa showing now.
since four decades ago usa has avoided to show the true colors of mars.
russia also showed best colour or mars satellites and plantet decades ago.
chinese versions of mars also with the colors of mars altered.

people has been manipulated since the 60's.
if you check the unaltered released moon landing movie, you can watch the transparency in the astronauts...
humans are not transparent...
so good movie, then.

you dont spend millions to get a fake color.

full silence from the maker of the lens and camera.

why all those protecting layers for a simple color?

mhmm... what could be the cause?

originally posted by: lux666
just curious...

why there are 2 hotspots there?
top left= yellow,
top right = blue

Probably because of the way they coloured the image and the fact that the image is a composite of two images taken one in the morning and the other in the afternoon, with the Sun in two different positions in the sky.

I always wondered what this disney version are Nasa showing now.
since four decades ago usa has avoided to show the true colors of mars.
russia also showed best colour or mars satellites and plantet decades ago.
chinese versions of mars also with the colors of mars altered.

I don't understand what you mean by all that, but the colours have been more or less the same since we got colour cameras on Mars.

people has been manipulated since the 60's.
if you check the unaltered released moon landing movie, you can watch the transparency in the astronauts...
humans are not transparent...
so good movie, then.

No, they weren't transparent, that's what bad television looked like in the 60s.

you dont spend millions to get a fake color.

No, the false colours are only for "public relations" use, science uses mostly the greyscale photos, colour is not that important for science purposes.

full silence from the maker of the lens and camera.

Obviously, the camera is working as expected, the mission is going according to the plan, what do you expect them to say?

why all those protecting layers for a simple color?

mhmm... what could be the cause?

What do you mean by that?

How is the desert this time of year?

I doubt Mars is really red/orange as we were told about.

a reply to: HawkEyi

That depends, many areas are really covered with that reddish dust, some not.

And if we adjust the colours the sky can even appear slightly blue.

a reply to: ArMaP

1)ah, a time delayed photo?
yes, that could explain the 2 spots on the sky..
maybe the curiosity spend a lot of hours there?
or moved around and arrived at the same exact point to take the photo?

2)the colour that people about mars have been changed.
on the past century there were missions that photographed the ice on mars in the mornings, and the tones of the sky changed.
there were also russian probes with different tones of mars.
nasa says that is impossible for them to get true colors, but do we have photos from telescopes with better quality, and also the photos of the probes on mars in the past century were with high quality.
for example, if comparing the yellow gold color in the probes on earth before launching, and then compared with the color showed by nasa on mars, there were a change of color.

the transparency.
decades ago I saw on the nasa facilities footage of the "moon landing", on those devices, exactly as the people saw it in that time.

as I am of the old guard, I can tell you that the people shown on those tv screens were not transparent. even if the transmission were in black and white, you couldnt and shouldnt see that is behind a person, because human bodies are not transparent, and less if they are using a space suit, which is also not transparent.

in that videos, that were not edited, you could see the landscape behind fully defined, trought the astronaut.

In that time, that fx effect started to be used, and today is common in computing.

the videos when were digitalized, were edited, and the mistake were corrected, the transparency were removed from some of them. the moon landing video were corrected.

if you have a camera that can take and display lot of colors, ultra resolution, and you only see a few, altered colors , where yellow is not yellow, for example. is logical to ask why do not use the colors that the camera is able to send?
time ago nasa showed an image that has yellow (that can be compared with the original photo taken before the launch)
and that image that showed nasa as "true colors in mars" has not the yellow of the device.
then it is a lot of effort to not show the original colors of mars, (or closer).

originally posted by: lux666
1)ah, a time delayed photo?
yes, that could explain the 2 spots on the sky..
maybe the curiosity spend a lot of hours there?
or moved around and arrived at the same exact point to take the photo?

A little more than that. The image we see was made with two different images, and each one of those images is a mosaic of 6 photos. Each one of those six photos was taken with an interval of approximately 30 seconds between each photo, and there's an 8 hours difference between the two mosaics.

2)the colour that people about mars have been changed.
on the past century there were missions that photographed the ice on mars in the mornings, and the tones of the sky changed.

The colours change on Earth too, things do not look the same on different days, so it's natural that the same thing happens on Mars.

there were also russian probes with different tones of mars.
nasa says that is impossible for them to get true colors, but do we have photos from telescopes with better quality, and also the photos of the probes on mars in the past century were with high quality.
for example, if comparing the yellow gold color in the probes on earth before launching, and then compared with the color showed by nasa on mars, there were a change of color.

That's also natural, as the light is not the same. On Earth, the photos were, if I'm not mistaken, taken either with artificial light or in sunlight, and both are different from the light on Mars, not only because there's much less light on Mars but also because of the dust in the air on Mars, that makes everything look reddish, in the same way things look reddish during sand storms on Earth.

Also, you cannot compare photos taken by satellites with photos taken on the ground, as the cameras are much different.

the transparency.
decades ago I saw on the nasa facilities footage of the "moon landing", on those devices, exactly as the people saw it in that time.

as I am of the old guard, I can tell you that the people shown on those tv screens were not transparent. even if the transmission were in black and white, you couldnt and shouldnt see that is behind a person, because human bodies are not transparent, and less if they are using a space suit, which is also not transparent.

The transparency only happens on moving objects during those bad quality transmissions, probably because the moving image was not strong enough to be fully registered by the light sensor in the camera.

if you have a camera that can take and display lot of colors, ultra resolution, and you only see a few, altered colors , where yellow is not yellow, for example. is logical to ask why do not use the colors that the camera is able to send?
time ago nasa showed an image that has yellow (that can be compared with the original photo taken before the launch)
and that image that showed nasa as "true colors in mars" has not the yellow of the device.
then it is a lot of effort to not show the original colors of mars, (or closer).

Colour correction is one of the hardest things to do, specially when you do not have access to the remote camera to change its settings. Also, different rovers have used different methods, only Curiosity and Perseverance have colour cameras as we know them, the other rovers/landers before them used monochromatic cameras with wheel filters to change the light the camera would capture. With those cameras you would need 3 different photos from the right filters to create an approximate true colour image. If you used the images from the wrong filters then the colours would look much different.

originally posted by: gortex
the image is also false colour.

Ofcourse.