An Afternoon on Mars
Afternoon on Mars (MSL Mastcam mosaic)(NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS. Edit by Jason Major)
Here’s a pretty picture for your Friday: a mosaic of Mastcam images acquired by Curiosity on mission Sol 582, also known to us Earthlings as Thursday, March 27, 2014. Barsoom sure looks lovely this time of year!
The mosaic was assembled from five raw images downlinked to the MSL site earlier today. I pasted them together in Photoshop, aligning the edge of one to the next using landscape objects as visual markers, and then did a little bad pixel cleanup (Mastcam has a notorious black smudge a few pixels wide just off-center) and then cropped the result, with a bit of surface cloning at the lower right to fill in some missing Martian soil. The I hit it with an HDR filter, which I’m usually not a fan of but in in this instance it turned out pretty nice.
See s hi-resolution version of this on my Flickr album.
You can find all the raw images from Curiosity — including the ones I used to compose this image — here.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS. Edit/composite by Jason Major.
Recent Posts
Starlink on Mars? NASA Is Paying SpaceX to Look Into the Idea
NASA has given the go-ahead for SpaceX to work out a plan to adapt its…
Did You Hear Webb Found Life on an Exoplanet? Not so Fast…
The JWST is astronomers' best tool for probing exoplanet atmospheres. Its capable instruments can dissect…
Vera Rubin’s Primary Mirror Gets its First Reflective Coating
First light for the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) is quickly approaching and the telescope is…
Two Stars in a Binary System are Very Different. It's Because There Used to be Three
A beautiful nebula in the southern hemisphere with a binary star at it's center seems…
The Highest Observatory in the World Comes Online
The history of astronomy and observatories is full of stories about astronomers going higher and…
Is the JWST Now an Interplanetary Meteorologist?
The JWST keeps one-upping itself. In the telescope's latest act of outdoing itself, it examined…