What tourist would journey far from home without a camera? You certainly wouldn’t travel 120,000,000 miles without one, and JPL’s Mars rovers and orbiters haven’t disappointed us. Although as I write this Spirit is in “critical condition” crippled by some sort of undetermined anomaly, there are hopeful signs now that communications have been reestablished. NASA hedged its bets with another chance, known as Opportunity, scheduled to touch-down tonight.

The postcards we’ve received so far from the Mars rovers (and their orbiters) have been the perfect wrap-up to a year of spectacular views of the Red Planet. It was just last August that amateurs, along with many of the public, gazed on fiery planet at its closest approach to Earth in thousands of years. Robotic rovers have given us a totally different perspective, one from the surface of the planet itself. Mars is not just a tiny planet orbiting the Sun out there somewhere. From the ground it looks more like the Arizona desert than an alien planet. Maybe water, and maybe microbial life, aren’t so far fetched after all.

These inspiring and thought provoking images have been shown widely in the media. Remarkably, lander images are taken with a 1-megapixel cameras. By today’s standards, that’s not much. Far higher resolution, 3-megapixel digital cameras are low-end, consumer-grade items sold almost everywhere. High-end cameras now sport 5 or 6 megapixels and wealth of picture modes and imaging options. Not that the rover’s cameras would be cheap: their optics are of superb quality and the chip (and pixels) are four times larger than earthling’s. Rather than a three-color mask on the CCD chip in your camera, color imaging is done with a sequence of images through filters.

The Pancam’s stunning, ruddy color images and panoramas have garnered the most attention. Stitching together snapshots into a wide-angle pan is easy: once care is taken to provide adequate overlap between adjacent pictures, software (often supplied in the camera’s box) will assemble the panorama automatically. The 3D images, viewed through red-blue glasses, give depth to the photos from Mars. Although Spirit's pancam has two (that is, stereo) cameras on the mast, you can do it yourself with one camera: just shift it laterally between shots and bring them into your favorite image processing program. Instructions on how to produce your own 3D image are available on the web: do a google.com search on “anaglyph”, a technique, interestingly enough, invented not long after photography itself.

My favorite images so far have been from the unprecedented close-ups from the Athena microscopic imager camera. Amazingly, the closer you look, the more Mars looks like Earth. Which two of these close-up images of "sand" are from Mars? The rest are from Earth's seashores. From a browser view, the Mars' images are linked to a JPL press release page. Other locations will be revealed by moving your mouse over the image.

 Moondark is written by Doug Miller, published at the Moondark web site, and printed in the Delmarva Star Gazers' Star Gazer News. This document was last revised on 25 January 2004. Text and images copyright © 2004 by Douglas C. Miller, All Rights Reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without prior permission.