Alien Anomalies

qmantoo · Teaching the truth

RE: Pancam Malfunction, Fireflies, Stars, or just lots of Tinkerbells ?

Chandre · Dedicated to the truth

Well done gmantoo, that is really interesting smile

I wonder if the bright horizon star could be Earth, call me a romantic but the thought of the Rover looking up at Earth in the night sky is quite appealing !

qmantoo · Teaching the truth

The things in motion are comets, and other 'things' whizzing about in the Martian atmosphere !

qmantoo · Teaching the truth

I am afraid they are almost definitely stars as I have animated a series of 5 and you can see the star moving with the relative position of Mars.

If you want to have a look it is here but these animations get very big, very quickly. This is a series of 5 gifs rolled into one animation and it is over 1Mb already.

Here is a Mars sunset with stars and a couple of smallish clouds and it is nearly 3Mb and 26 gifs so it will take a while to load. I have added a few frames at the end to make it stop for a while to show where the end is... I suppose I could colourise the jpegs and do it again, that would look rather cool if I could get it right with the right colours..

It seems that (in my browser anyway), you need to click on the animation to get it to display full size and full speed - this is if you get a small circle with a '+' sign in it when you place your mouse over the gif..

qmantoo · Teaching the truth

Not only appearing to be blurred to show motion, but there are sequences which I have clicked one after the other in my browser and this appears to have motion in it too.

Some light spots are gone from one picture to another because they are taken with a little time in between and obviously some light spots are not long-lived. In particular, the large one seems to be moving down the frame in this sequence. I will try to find it again and maybe we can make a short gif of it perhaps.

Maybe this is another experiment I could try - automatically making gifs out of individual frames. Don't know how it would work yet.

ICEMAN · Senior Member

qmantoo, smart idea.

I made some color changes. Some things seem to be in motion.

Chandre · Dedicated to the truth

Be interesting to see if we could identify any constellations....

qmantoo · Teaching the truth

This could be interesting or it could be a complete red-herring.

I was about to mark this series of Pancam photos as a red "non-photo" when I suddenly wondered if they have beings/flies that make their own light up there. Similar to fireflies?

After all, Tinkerbell was a light-being (I realise this is pushing the boundaries a bit!) It could just be NASA photographing the stars or maybe there was an x-ray storm?

It also occurred to me that there are a few of the same kind of picture link to this one here and why should NASA continue to take these pictures as the Pancam is obviously not malfunctioning. This was on drive B1 as well. on sol 1977 & 1978.

What do you think?