10 November 2008
Mars Art Galleries!
Posted by Ryan Anderson
Apparently I am not the only person who has had the idea of posting “artistic” images of Mars! In the past week I’ve come across two sites with collections of Mars Art images. So in lieu of posting my own image this week, I’ll point you to these sites who had the idea before me!
First is a site by Jim Plaxco called simply the Mars Art Gallery. It has lots of images, both unaltered and false-colored. He tends to manipulate the images a bit much for my tastes, but some of the results are pretty cool. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like the site had been updated recently. Here are a few samples:
A view of the south polar residual cap “swiss cheese terrain” in a strange color scheme.
The second site is a very nice NASA site that I can’t believe I had never seen before! It is a treasure trove of beautiful mars images in both greyscale and false color form orbiters and the rovers. Here are a couple of examples, but you really should go check out the whole gallery. I’ve got my work cut out for me in later Mars Art posts to beat this site’s gallery!
Granule ripples at Meridiani, as seen by the Opportunity rover.
A false color view of the Meridiani region a few hundred kilometers north of the Opportunity landing site. Red indicates warm rocks, while blue indicates cooler sand or dust.
It’s nice to see that at least some space geeks have at least a bit of
the humanities in them.
That’s how you are going to relate the Universe to the unwashed masses,
cause they don’t care about dry old data on some distant planet. They
want pretty pictures if you want to reel em in an educate em!
Carl Sagan knew this ages ago, but it seems it has to be relearned all the time.