Colorization of Mars Images?

ares2003 writes "There is no scientific reason, why JPL is colorizing Mars in that dull red tint as in their press release images. In the latest panorama image, there is a hint, that they deliberately altered the colors, as the blue and green spots on the color calibration target (the sundial) suddenly converted to bright red and brown. Source of original images: 1, 2 - (for highres replace "br" with "med"). At normal weather conditions, as we have at the moment, there should be a blue sky on Mars and earthlike colors. Furthermore the sky looks overcasted on the pictures as it cannot be considering the sharp shadows on the sundial. If the sky was overcast, then because of diffuse lighting, there would be no shadows. A few years ago, I did an investigation about that very same topic for the Viking and Pathfinder missions."

There may be no scientific reason

[Nevo]

..but releasing these images to the public is a public relations endeavor, not a scientific endeavor.

Re:Check the links, editors

[cyberfunk2]

Just because his other stuff is bogous doesnt explain why this seemingly obvious color-editing is going on.

You guys have it all wrong...

[mOoZik]

He's not talking about merely colorization (in this case, redder than it is), but the the fact that the colors of the sundial do not match in the pictures is a bit disturbing. Why don't they match? If it was a uniform coloration, it would be understandable. Or is it perhaps a mistake and that they meant to color the other two colored areas?

Re:It's quite simple really

[mark-t]

Why the F*** would they care whether or not some conspiracy freaks choose to misinterpret the facts as a coverup?

Catering to it is no better than being an advocate of the conspiracy theories in the first place.

Re:"ballistic approach to punctuation"

[cetan]

Or maybe the editor needs to learn how...well how to do anything really.

Yet another moronic story approved by /.'s in-house fuckwad.

A Current Affair, Inside Edition, Slashdot.

[Goner]

Oh man. I've been reading this site for a while. This story should just be deleted, or at least have the links removed. There is absolutely no need to give this loon publicity while taxing the jpl site for no reason.

Re:Check the links, editors

[Tassach]

Why shouldn't NASA color-enhance images used for PUBLIC RELATIONS purposes? This isn't the data that scientists are going to use - it's advertising, designed to get them good PR and consequentally, more funding. Joe Sixpack doesn't care about science, but he does like shiny things. Scientists, and anyone else who really needs or wants it, can get the raw data.

Re:It's quite simple really

[Ralph Yarro]

The average person expects Mars to be red, if they don't make it red people will not think its Mars. It's not really that they are 'lying' or anything, its just that the average person is too ignorant for them to want to deal with the hassle of everyone wanting to know why the pictures are not red.

I'm sure glad my taxes are being spent reinforcing people's incorrect beliefs instead of being wasted on education and elightenment.

The Martian Sky is butterscotch, not blue

[UPAAntilles]

This story should be pulled, it is wrong in too many places, and is just a bunch of conspiracy mumbo-jumbo. The pictures are slightly modded for color, but that's because it's a collage

As evidenced, here [nasa.gov], the Martian sky is more yellow/butterscotch (they used the Viking landers American flag to balance the colors properly,pictures are on the website). The Martian sky doesn't really get "overcasted" as there is no moisture in the air to create clouds! There is dust, yes, but the atmosphere is so thin, the sunlight can still go through it. Ares2003 has a few loose screws-My guess is that the digital image of the craft itself was taken later in the martian day, and modifying the color of the photo was the only way to make it look like it "fit in". Mars should not have "earth-like" colors. Any glance through a moderately-powerful telescope will show that the "red planet" is, in fact, red in color (iron oxide dust). Those more yellow pictures of Mars floating around are actually not real photographs, but generated images from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter data.

To see lots of pictures and some scientific conjecture and analysis, you can go here [the-planet-mars.com]

Anybody else notice...

[NanoGator]

I'm looking at a large high res panorama of mars right now. There's a nice silvery bit on the rover that is virtually untouched by any color alterations. I can see where they might have enhanced the saturation a little, but if they colorized it, they went through a hell of a lot of effort to do so. (i.e. cutting out the non-red objects, etc...)

Sorry, not buying this story. Even if Nasa did colorize it, so what? I spent a day at a major news network once. I got to watch how they get their stories up. EVERY photo that goes up for a story is retouched. When I was there, there was a big story about a wildfire eating up a lot of land. They took some stock footage of a firefighter putting out a fire in the woods. Then, they highlighted the fire itself and used a tool to make it look brighter and hotter. (Note: This wasn't supposed to be a photo of the fire itself, but rather one of those illustrations that appears behind the news anchor as he announces the story..)

The point? The reason they brightened the fire was to draw attention to the audience. Highlight the important elements of the scene. There's no crime or dishonest happening here. If Nasa boosted the saturation of their images to make their images more recognizable Mars, so what? Damn them for presenting their findings more clearly.

Re:Mars has become a political agenda

[John_Booty]

USA Today has a good article [usatoday.com] about how Mars is shifting from science to politics.

Wait a minute. You're suggesting that missions to other celestial bodies might have... political or nationalistic overtones that often far dwarf the actual scientific value of the mission?

Um... do you know anything about the space race between the U.S. and Soviet Union?

Feynman

[sleepingsquirrel]

You might be interested in a little something by Richard Feynman [brocku.ca]

I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen. For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of his work were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any." He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind." I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing-- and if they don't support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.

And in other news...

[fiannaFailMan]

... Bush decides to quadruple the record budget deficit while he's at it with a mission to Jupiter.

These plans are all very exciting folks, but our grandchildren are going to be paying the bill one day. It's time for the current administration to cut up the credit cards and start taking packed lunches instead of eating out, for a day of reckoning is coming and the American taxpayer is going to suffer badly. Entry into the third world awaits....

Re:Mosaic

[Zordak]

It's not

rocket science, after all...

Which is exactly the problem. Never send a rocket scientist to do an artist's job.

Re:Mars has become a political agenda

[cetialphav]

I don't agree that this is being sensationalized. This is a sensational accomplishment and I think the general public understands this. The fact that our last two attempts had failed, and the Beagle 2 failed, and the Japanese spacecraft failed really drives home the point that what JPL is doing is hard, hard stuff.

I do think that some journalists drive the "life on Mars" angle too heavily, but then I don't expect the 10 o'clock news to have the same cautious scientific approach as NASA.

As to the politics, well, NASA is a government agency. It is a political creation and it has to fight for its money just like everyone else. So it doesn't surprise me when they try to get these super high definition images out. As a supporter of the space program, I wish NASA did a better job with their PR. Like they said in The Right Stuff, "No bucks, no Buck Rogers."

Individual channels available

[x4A6D74]

If you here [nasa.gov], for example, you can see a good quantity of the images they're releasing. They're in groups of three, for the most part -- and funny, but light has three primary colors -- and they seem to be in RGB order (as guessed by experimentation with the white tones in the last set, with the airbag visible). Thus you too can see what Mars looks like before being color (calibrated|corrected|conspiricized) by integrating the three images in (your favorite imaging software). Then, if only we could find the color data for the calibration sundial, it would be possible to recurve the colors to match the known values. I haven't found this stuff yet, but I'm stil looking. And I don't know if the GIMP can do this part (since I haven't used it enough) but I'm postive that Photoshop or Corel Photo-Paint can handle it. So get the data and prove for yourself whether or not it's real!

Re:Check the links, editors

[Tassach]

I'm sure the general public would love to see what mars really looks like, rather than some lie

I disagree. The general public wants to see pretty pictures that are compatible with their preconceptions. Geeks want to see pictures which look exactly like what they would see if they were standing there.

Re:The Martian Sky is butterscotch, not blue

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a good website discussing the colors in the martian atmosphere.

http://webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/14C.html

Color is subjective

[Solandri]

You know those glorious red sunsets that cast dramatic shadows and coloring onto everyone and everything around you? If you color correct those, they turn into boring "normal" scenes with apparently white lighting.

Color is a figment of your brain's imagination. In some situations, a proper white balance will make the picture closely match what your brain perceives (else people would have green skin under fluorescent lighting). In other situations (like sunsets), a proper white balance makes the picture look completely different from what your brain perceives.

This issue came up with the pictures from the Viking landers. The first pictures sent back, before color calibration, had a blue sky. IIRC the color correction NASA did wasn't a pure white balance, but something to more closely reflect how the scene would look to your eyes (and brain) if you were there.

Re:Check the links, editors

[BlameFate]

The last images if you scroll down the page linked as "1" in the article are of the sundial calibration instrument, on Mars, displaying the correct colors (as seen in the lab on earth).

Note that in those photos they have 'greyed out' the portion of the photograph containing the atmosphere and surface of the planet.

Re:Check the links, editors

[WasteOfAmmo]

An experiment for you:

Go out and by some theatrical gel filters ("tough no green" or "tough 1/2 green" will do). Cut them into strips, roll them to make tubes and slide tubes over each of the fluorescent lights in a room. Now:

• Turn on the lights and leave the room for about 10 minutes.
• Look into the room and notice how everything looks pinkish in the room.
• Enter the room (everything still looks "wierd") and look at objects outside of the room (they look "normal").
• Wait 10 minutes and try the above step again.

You will notice that once you have become accustom to the light in the room that objects in the room sort of look "normal" (not quite though) and everything outside of the room looks pink.

Now I ask you, in both cases you have a "pink" area and a "normal" area, so which area is showing true colors and what will your Canon PowerShot A60 show?

My point: color perception can be fooled quite easily and what you see as red may not be red or not what I see as red and certainly not necessarily the same tint or red the anyone/anything else sees it as. Ambient lighting conditions do have an effect on what color objects are precieved to be. This effect may not necessarily be the same for your eyes and a camera.

Merlin.

For those of you curious: the above experiment was done to some offices where I use to work as the persons working in them found the shifted light reduced eye strain.

Re:And in other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Never took a macroeconomics or economic policy class, huh?

The way to run a country is not to cut spending. The way to run a country is to increase spending in ways that promote industry and to cut taxes. The result is growth across the board, which in turn leads to increases in revenue.

The recent (say, last 20 years or so) obsession with balanced annual budgets has distracted people from the fact that we really need to be thinking in terms of decades, not months.

I think it might be a good idea to eliminate the annual federal budget altogether and replace it with a quadrennial budget. It just makes good economic sense to plan over longer baselines.

Re:Mosaic - be patient, grateful

[dekashizl]

I definitely agree that the mosaics are a bit rough, but I'd *much* rather see a rough mosaic *today* than a polished one two weeks from now. I have faith that we'll get both.

For news, status, updates, scientific info, images, video, and more, check out:
Mars Exploration Rover Highlights (AXCH) [axonchisel.net].

human eyes adapt

[bob_jenkins]

Human eyes are pretty good at white-balancing whatever the current ambient lighting is to make sure we what we see doesn't become all red or all yellow or whatever. We can tell red from blue under sunlight, incandescent lights, and fluorescents. The only thing I've seen that totally turns off my color vision (other than darkness) is sodium streetlamps, presumably because they put out only one frequency.

Ambient lighting on Mars is probably pretty far from what is normal on Earth. To tell what Mars would actually look like to us on Mars, somebody might need to do some special testing of the responsiveness of human eyes under that ambient lighting.

Re:And in other news...

[fiannaFailMan]

Spending increases and simultaneous tax cuts are what cause deficits. Sure there are times, like during a depression, when you should run a bit of a deficit to stimulate growth, but the deficit that Bush has run up is just way out of hand. The mess he has made of the public accounts will have a far-reaching effect long after Howard dean's second term is up. ;-) Assuming a fiscally prudent President takes over tomorrow, it'll take at least ten years to undo the damage Bush has done. That doesn't make sense in the short, long or medium term.

Mod parent up by the way, the guy argues his case well even if I disagree with it.

The martian sky IS RED.

[noselasd]

Ok, wether or not NASA does false colorization of the pictures I cannot tell.
However it IS well known among scientists that does not base their work at false colored pictures that the martian sky is red at day, and blue at sunset/sunrise. It really doesn't take that long time with google to
find some facts from trusted sources on thatone.

Re:Feynman

[kfg]

The problem is that people aren't given proper training to understand the truthful answers you give them, even when you include such training in the explanation.

All they hear is "I don't know."

"Well Jeeeeezus. I thought you were supposed to be some kind of expert or something. If I wanted to be told 'I don't know' I could have asked my retard cousin Vinnie. I'm gonna go watch the FOX special on this. Those boys talk straight and tell me The Answer.

The problem is fostered in our lower schools. They are taught "facts," and are given tests to determine if they have memorized those facts well enough to regurgitate them, i.e. give the "right" answer to the question. Even mathmatics is treated as simple arithmetic where you manipulate some numbers to come up with a predetermined correct outcome.

All of this teaches science not just as facts, but as a field where things are simply either correct or incorrect. Knowledge as a collection of preapproved facts and for every question there as an answer.

Whereas science, that is to say the real sort of science that Feynman is talking about, isn't about known true facts so much as it's about the limitations on our knowledge and why those limitations exist and what we might do to expand those limitations.

If they haven't had the proper background, fairly early in life, when you explain these things to people as well as it's possible to explain them all the vast majority hear is:

"I don't know."

Then wander off muttering that the problem with scientists is that they refuse to give you straight answer, never suspecting that that's good science.

After a decade or four of this even most scientist legitimately trying to exlain things properly get frustrated and devise a set of stock answers. When given these stock answers people respong "Whoooooa! Really? Hey, that's pretty neat" and walk away with a smile on their face. Perhaps a wee bit better educated on a facts basis but no wiser.

It doesn't stop me from telling things as they are, but I've found over the years that the only real audience is children. They listen, they pay attention, they learn.

And I hope they then grow up to hear more than "I don't know" when told the truth as we actually know it, especially if they get elected to congress.

For that matter I hope they grow up to be scientists who tell the truth . . . and get elected to congress.

KFG

Kook! He's looking at linear interpolation!

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy's saying that artifacts from zooming in way past the level of detail actually obtained using some type of linear falloff are pyramids! This is about at funny as the "face" on Mars people.

Kooks. They seem to know enough to know better but some people like fairy tales better than reality.

pseudoscience and conspiracy theory is not science

[meheler]

I have a question. Why is slashdot publishing pseudoscience "news" under the guise of science? For shame.