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Originally posted by Viendin
..Sorry to bust your bubble, folks, but you've got to "Shift" out of Conspiracy-Mode every once in a while.
No one let any cat out of any bags. The methods for taking pictures are to use various filters and then reconstruct them with computers from the raw data we receive. You can't just send a 50MB Bitmap from Mars too reliably!
The reconstruction is the bit we had a correspondence on, and it's the bit that would have to do with the final look of the pictures. It isn't that they come back normal and some one reddens them, it's that they come back and get fed through a few filters and a program much like Photoshop compiles the filters into a single, flowing image. The problem is, that some cameras taking some data through some filters are "brighter" - and so they need to be turned down on reconstruction. Others are dimmer, so they must be turned up, and in the end, the filtered pieces of the image have to be brightened/dimmed/red/blue/greened to adjust for the expected loss/gain of information. It is a very highly perfected process, and the chances that NASA is messing it up severely are slim to nil.
The ability to change those pictures and say "This is what it really looks like" is not a fantastical one. You could do it with free software known as GIMP, or pay software like Photoshop, or anything in between, by just modifying colour channels.
Now, they, and we, know what the atmosphere is composed of due to spectroscopic analyses from orbit, not colourised pictures on the ground. Mars should not have a blue sky like ours at all, as its atmosphere is not composed chiefly of Nitrogen and secondarily of Oxygen. I belief it is Carbon Dioxide and Hydrogen, but I am not entirely sure, and am in no real mood to check up right now.
The important thing is that a national laboratory/organisation is not untrustable just because it is official. If a man came up to you and showed you that 2+2=4 on a piece of paper, and the answer of 2+2 were to dictate what you did next, then another man arrives and just keeps telling you the first man was lying and hates you, and that it is 5, which would you believe? Would you believe the one that made logical sense and was official, or the one that was illogical, but sensational?
It's a very oversimplified way to put it, but it's the way it is.
And for the record, The rocks are red due to high iron content. It's rust.
And no, in the second link, it is not a forest or a wide area of vegetation - it's a spectroscopic reading of a Methane deposit. It supported the idea that life must be on Mars producing Methane for such a buildup to exist, until means of buildups such as that lasting for hundreds of thousands of years were shown, and it is merely interesting, not a near proof.
XFacts is not a trustable site - anywhere with links to what Dan Akroyd thinks of Art Bell to someone's claims on what the Sumerian's believed relating to Planet X, is probably not very trust-worthy. Go to the Space & Exploration area, go to Wikipedia - learn before you guess. Please.
EDIT: I've just realised a mistake in my post, I said that Mars' sky should be completely unlike ours, because its atmosphere is composed of different elements/compounds. I am wrong, it could be a very similar look if the elements/compounds absorb/reflect light similarly to our own, but it is not necessarily required. Again, I'm a bit too tired to actually check it at the moment.
[edit on 17-7-2005 by Viendin]
Originally posted by iori_komei
I thought I'd just point this out.
The sky is blue because of the light reflecting off the water, which itself is blue.
And the reason the sky is blue everywhere in the world is because are planet is 70% water, so light reflecting off that kind of area makes the sky blue.