How’s about LOLCats dump some ripe kittylitter down your scope? Along with the other resi-’dews’?

I mean — really!

HQ

So Mr Doug it’s easy to mistake a sculpture for a natural shaped rock. Well…how can you be so sure which is the case???

The anthropomorph is way over around the lower-left corner, on the edge of a rise in the foreground, and it is TINY.

Btw, I don’t know if it’s the squirrel chasing the guitar, but I found what is clearly a Martian hedgehog. In fact, as I stared at the full-res image I began to see tiny men in many of the shadows. The bigfoot figure is just above the large rocks at the far lower left.

Once you know how far away it is ( 4.7m +/- a few cm ) then you can use that information along with the angular resolution of the object to calculate another triangle – one with a base that is the dimension of the object, and peak is at the camera. You know the angle, you know the height of the triangle, so calculating the base is again, just maths. In this case, 5.7cm (+/- a few mm ) It’s very very reliable and suprisingly accurate. Put a credit card on opposite side of a reasonable sized room, and that’s the sort of size and distance we’re talking about.

Doug

The actual exposure time for every pancam frame is found in the PDS header of the calibrated data product that is released in 3 months chunks, 6 months down the line. I found a typical Pancam exposure from the PDS here : http://anserver1.eprsl.wustl.edu/navigator/productPage.aspx?prodId=2P133384688EFF2232P2582L2C1&prodClass=science&prodView=label : and the exposure is described as
EXPOSURE_DURATION = 256.0

So basically, 1/4 of a second.

However – that’s not the time issue that Emily was refering to. Every image Pancam takes is black and white. The colour images are built from three black and white images. One taken thru a red filter, one thru blue, one thru green ( typically near IR, green and blue actually )

http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_instrument/images/integ3.jpg shows the filter wheel that does this.

It takes a few seconds to take a picture, download it to the rover’s computer, turn the filter wheel, and then take another picture. Something like 20 to 30 seconds – that sort of range. What Emily was suggesting wasn’t that our little basalt yeti would visibly move in the 1/4 second exposure, but that it would visibly move between the taking of the red and green, and the green and blue images.

Things DO move on Mars and exhibit this artifact of filtered imaging. Firstly, dust devils
http://pancam.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_instrument/everest.html
or http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/spirit/20051107a/Everest_L257atc-A622R1_br2.jpg

You can see, with the full resolution of that panorama, a wierd green fuzzy patch and a red fuzzy patch – off near the horizon, right of centre. That’s a dust devil moving between filters.

http://pancam.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_instrument/335B_heatshield.html is another example – the little glare reflections from the foil of the heatshield have moved around – you can see a little red, blue and green glare marks that are in different places, because the sun has moved slightly, and the foil has blown a little in the wind.

One thing to note is that when they take stereo images ( i.e. the left and right eye together ) those images are actually taken at the very same time. But colour images are typically all done with the left camera and you need to wait between filters to take the images.

So, unless our granite friend stood stood perfectly still for 82 seconds – we would have seen three seperate little strolling Yeti’s in the different filters. And, given that we also have a lower resolution image from 3 days before – that shows it in the same position – it’s fair to say that this is a ‘static’ object. We’ve seen hundreds if not thousands of odd shaped rocks with the rovers. But then, we’ve all seen odd shaped rocks with our own eyes – the cliffs that look like faces, the pebble that looks like a button, the chunk of flint that looks like a bone etc etc. That, from the hundreds of thousands of rocks observers on mars, one looks a bit like a strolling yeti, is far from exceptional.

Doug

Minutes ago, channel 4 news in Jacksonville, Florida ran a credulous story about this image…..Bad Astronomy wasn’t referenced, nor was Emily, nor was any of the information they present.

Why would they be mentioned, Blue? Ain’t their picture and Bad Astronomy’s opinions on the NASA picture are worth no more and no less than anyone elses.

I know, it’s a martian leprechaun! a martian leprechaun that’s been turned into stone by the matian medusa!

OOH SPOOKY!

I couldn’t help but notice in the planetary.org photo, down the bottom near the rover there’s what appears to be a squirrel chasing a guitar. Yes, you heard correctly.

It’s a MARTIAN squirrel chasing a MARTIAN guitar. On MARS. Quick, someone get Hoagland! There’s are squirrels on Mars! Chasing guitars, I tell you!

Also just a bit to the right of the top of the vertical column like bit of the rover in the picture there is a strange rock that is slanted at a weird angle. Funny enough this looked a lot to me like one of the wyrms of Dune. Bleh… Anyway. It does not look like a rock. It’s texture is completely different than the rest of the rocks on the picture. More knobbly whereas the other rocks have clearly been eroded by wind.

Look at all that dust on that beautiful robot!

Poor thing.

My kingdom for a case of canned air and a 60 million mile long extension tube!

Two days of controversy experienced and resolved in only ten minutes, with beautiful Mars pictures as my ultimate reward.

Bad Astronomy wasn’t referenced, nor was Emily, nor was any of the information they present.

Florida: Doomed.

I also like the sandy “path” leading off on the far right side of the picture.
Formed by Martian winds? A rolling boulder? Migrating Martian Woowoobeasts?