It was a month ago yesterday that NASA announced they'd be doing the Lion King panorama looking back at Eagle crater. They released one small segment...

...then nothing.

My "PanCam Lab" software's coming along nicely, so I thought I'd try something ambitious, and this panorama fits the bill. It turned out that several of the raw images were bad (the technical term is "buggered"), and maybe that's why JPL dropped the idea. Too bad, because the images are repairable. In the spirit of the blind hog and the acorn, it turned out that because my kludgly software doesn't depend on calibration data and makes lots of pragmatic compromises, it doesn't collapse with a fit of the vapors if something isn't perfect. I just had to add a little routine to compensate for the problem, which creates a correction factor called "BuggerCompensation" (I kid you not). Without further ado, then, here's (most of) the Lion King panorama.

(Click for larger versions)

Eagle is certainly a kinder, gentler crater than the view of Endurance Nick brought us yesterday, isn't it? I think we're fortunate, in retrospect, that the lander bounced into Eagle and not Endurance, not all that far away.