We planetary scientists are spoiled. Yeah, so most of my days are spent programming, wrestling with excel spreadsheets, and editing Word documents. But some of our data is beautiful. I’ve raved before about the pretty pictures coming down from new instruments like HiRISE, but even our vintage data is spectacular. For example, feast your eyes on this mosaic of Viking 1 images, put together by Daniel Machacek. I highly recommend clicking the image and downloading the full-resolution (21 MB) version.

Absolutely beautiful, and assembled from data taken before I was born! In the image, east is up and North is to the left. On Daniel’s site, he has a lot more detail about the datasets and the major geographic features. It’s in Czech but easy enough to understand with Google translate. I particularly liked this version of the mosaic, which is rotated so that north is up and annotated so you can identify the major features:

(Hat tip to Emily for sharing this spectacular mosaic and pointing to Daniel’s blog!)