Thanks Robert.

I ended up nursing a friend's drunk wife tonight instead of pursuing my own interests, so I've got some energy to burn and want to bounce some thoughts off you. Maybe they'll be something you recognize.

What started my search for Viking panormaic images was the simple question as to whether the red dust on Mars simply overlays a gray colored surface. Plus to which, I simply wanted to have the images so that from time to time I could simply look at them.

57,000 images, many including a US flag emblem of presumably known or knowable colors, and we 1)don't have a panorama; and 2)can't do color adjusments? What's wrong with this picture?

One of the prevailing theories about Soviet space science was that they built military launchers, and then did some science with a few of them. The capitalist parallel would be that the US military industrial complex wanted to sell some rockets, and so NASA cooked up some space science missions. Naturally, of course, the true motive was quite different of course: back then Mars was widely believed to be an easily habitable planet...

But when you see data lying about unused, you have to ask yourself if maybe these folks aren't on to something - If selling rockets is the point of space science, then naturally what becomes of the data doesn't really matter.

Yeah, dealing with this data is a tough job, and NASA needed to pay someone money to work with these images, but they never did.

Why couldn't the flag images be used to calibrate the colors? Better yet, who didn't calibrate the colors before the Vikings were launched? And even betterer, consider that a duplicate could have been built and then used to calibrate the colors. Or could the lander in the Smithsonian have been used at an even lower cost?

No color correction? Maybe noboby wanted to see Mars' depressing brown sky; maybe the Mars money quickly ran out when people got a glnace at the surface there.

No lighting corrections? Maybe in the old days when computers could not really handle this sort of thing that might have been acceptable, but not today. And if you try to compare one total Mars mission cost with enhancement of an earlier data set, you have to use logarithms for the scales. Is the point of this exercise to learn about Mars, or is it to sell rockets?

With 57,000 images they could have done radon (?sp) transforms and gotten incredible detail.

Yeah, it would be nice if you didn't have to go through all this, and it sure isn't glamorous, but given the total cost of a Mars mission... Speaking about money, in point of fact about the only thing I want from the Mars data right now is accurate crater counts for the entire Mars Global Surveyor data set... in other words, pretty much the same thing I want for the Galileo data set...

Okay, given what we have, and the resources available, what next? How about just taking the images over to a white sky, which should give true geological colors as they would be seen in a laboratory?

Once again, Robert (and Frank) thanks for you time. Given what you've been through with this data, I hope some of these words may be expressing thoughts which you've had for some time...

Happy New Year,
EP

Ed,

I've played around with color Viking Lander images. It's hard to know how to
balance the colors, and the "true" color of Mars has been controversial since the
day of the first landing. I have two color images here. Not quite panoramas, but
wide swaths. The first one (21I091) shows frost, and I balanced the color to make
the frost white, and then superimposed the low-res color over a high-res
monochrome image. Whether the colors are right because I balanced against
frost is still up in the air--a reddish tinge might actually be proper if there's dust in
the atmosphere. However, the exposed dirt and rocks do roughly match the
supposedly-more-accurate Pathfinder colors, so maybe I did get it right.

I don't know if anybody's tried to do a color full panorama from Viking Lander
images. Even a mono panorama is a bear, what with stitching images and
correcting for the tilt of the lander. Trying to do color means matching images
taken at roughly the same time of day and season, and it doesn't seem as
though the Viking mission plan provided for a consistent full panorama like the
Pathfinder "Presidential" and the rest. Any color panorama would be a
Frankenstein patchwork of mismatched images from different hours and
seasons.

--Robert