My post was largely tongue-in-cheek, because as I said, I've been trying to get a handle on this for a long time. History is repeating itself in a pattern that's becoming familiar: NASA's first images released to the public have the classic dayglo Mordor appearance; outsiders criticize it, and come up with their own versions as Nick has done; and months later the Official Image Processing Experts release images they've labored over for months...that generally closely resemble the colors the amateurs guessed at initially.*
What I don't understand is that it takes more effort to produce the dayglo Mordor versions than it does to produce simple color combinations that "look right(er)". Why do it that way? That's what I don't get. And the consequence is that the general public, with its short attention span, remembers only dayglo Mordor, and generally don't see the officially-correct color images that come out months later. Mars is no paradise, but it's not quite as inhospitable as dayglo Mordor depicts. Is this depiction of Mars one factor in the public's indifference to Mars?
Would you rather live in a place that looks like this:
or a place that looks like this:
* - With the greatest respect for Nick, his professional specialty is geology. In the realm of image processing he may fairly be called an "amateur" without prejudice. A skilled amateur, but his PhD is in another field. I think his images are more correct than dayglo Mordor, but he can't back it up with 100 pages of equations and talk of "Nyquist thresholds" and "Fourier transforms". There is "right", and then there is "Right".
Space/Science » in reply to re: "What color is Mars, anyway?"
re: "What color is Mars, anyway?"
The whole thread (34 posts)
- Playing with colour in Opportunity Crater. - Warning - lots of images!
- re: Playing with colour in Opportunity Crater.
- So can you infer anything about the rocks from the filtered photos?
- Color--in the eye of the beholder.
- "What color is Mars, anyway?"
- Nasa accused of painting Mars red
- Errata!