Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to re: Just discovered: The Official True Color of Mars

Interesting test case

That's an interesting test because of all the blue in the raw data:

http://rovers.habitablezone.com/Gallery/Opportunity/Color/014/images/Oppy_014_StoneMountainRock_L4_L5_L6_512.jpg


However, it is a field of "blueberries", so I think it would be a bit rash to just declare the blue an impossibility. Dust from ground-up blueberries ("blueberry jam"?) might be tinting the surrounding soil. I don't want to let prejudgments interfere with perception of reality.

I made that out of L4, L5, and L6 images, which I chose because they produce the most inherently accurate sundial on sol 14:

http://rovers.habitablezone.com/Gallery/Opportunity/Color/014/images/Oppy_014_Sundial_L4_L5_L6.jpg


It's indisputable that the images show a great deal of blue. But let's play "angel's advocate":

To give NASA the maximum benefit of the doubt, let's suppose that their honest intention is to produce a sort of "artistic interpretation" of what the scene might look like to an observer with human eyes standing on the spot (completely disregarding the data in the actual images). Could be. But even so, the extreme standardization of this portrayal has to be, in my opinion, inherently wrong. What angle of illumination of the scene (time of day)? From what azimuth relative to subject and camera? What season (general solar azimuth)? With how much dust in the atmosphere? The standard artistic interpretation seems to assume, at a minimum, a rather dusty atmosphere. Do we have any independent confirmation that the atmosphere was that hazy that day?

Most important of all, of what subject? Somehow somebody at NASA saw enough blue in some image to call these "blueberries". Is it so inconceivable, then, that an image might show a color other than orange-brown? That's the problem: The rigid preconceptions embodied in a standard color scheme can significantly distort reality, sometimes, to the point of completely hiding what's already known to be true....as in this case.

There may be times when the standard portrayal just happens to correspond to reality, but it seems to me that that would be a matter of random chance. Instead of shoehorning all images into a one-size-fits-all preconception, I sure wish they'd find a way to just accurately calibrate the images to reflect the reality of each individual image.

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