Personally, I do not think this particular image has been tampered with in any way whatsoever.
I have examined the view in some detail along with the other associated images from the same sol.
The marks seen in the image were definitely made by the wheels of the rover, although if you look very closely at what there is on the terrain you will find there are some interesting surface anomalies to be observed.
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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
I have looked into Iceman's claims of tampering with his images at the forum, and I can find no evidence that any has taken place, the administration logs are in order and shows none of the team have edited images.
I do understand that in these strange times we live in it is hard to know who to trust or who to believe, the purpose of the forum is for the community to use to express opinions and debates in an environment free of ridicule and division.
Our members have pushed the boundaries in our understanding of the anomalies we have encountered, and Most members and visitors to the site know that we try to promote the truth honestly and without conflict, our members seem happy with the way Chandre has organised the threads and the way our team are running of the forum.
I hope a line can be drawn under this matter so we can concentrate on the evidence being discussed.
Xenon
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"Creating a fiction when stating a fact destroys the credibility of the truth one are trying to convey"
qmantoo I think you're talking to me. I would really love to discuss this but the downside is that academic discussions do not seem popular here. Too many people here have no vision based on serious research. posting material on this website is a waste of time because you are not honest.
Your speculation backward and forward cause damage more than what you do.
I think many of our problems are because we do not use the PDS for our images and so, as OBrien says, they are less detailed than the ones in the PDS. Add to this the image format in the PDS is not a standard for many software programs out there, so people do not know how to use the PDS and its data effectively.
Yes, there are programs like ISIS which process the raw PDS images and do the stuff necessary but it means an extra process and learning how to use new software which makes it a drag.
On the other hand, we should go for the most detailed photos available if we want to 'prove' anythjng is not right or not a true representation of the landscape, otherwise we dont have much of a leg to stand on. This may be the case here.
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/117989main_image_feature_347_ys_full.jpg is a mosaic approximately 4x the width of the Pancam field of view of 1024 pixels.
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/117989main_image_feature_347_ys_full.jpg has been published on the internet as a jpg with 800 x 600 pixels.
Therefore, http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/117989main_image_feature_347_ys_full.jpg has an inherent loss of resolution by a factor of (1024 x 4)/800 ~ 5 even before jpg compression.
It should be of no surprise that manipulating and zooming in on a region of this 800 x 600 jpg results in a much lower resolution image than retreiving a tif of the region from the Planetary Data System.
Comparing a low quality web photo to actual data and then claiming deception because the two are different is not a valid argument.
Here I show black and white picture of this area and there can clearly see what kind of deception NASA is always ready to apply by comparing the images together
Cropped and annotated 2P169774137EFFAAE0P2681L4M1 showing significant detail of surface structure, including tread and cleat marks of rover wheel tracks. Original 2P169774137EFFAAE0P2681L4M1 tiff retrieved from PDS.
I think what Iceman is saying is that he thinks this photo has been darkened to pretend that it is either sunset or sunrise. He thinks that the picture has been darkened in order to hide some of the things he points out to us.
However, from what little I know about photography, shooting a photograph into the sun normally makes the darker landscape under exposed - like this is. It is because the camera takes a meter reading of the brighter sun and then adjusts its exposure time to make that the correctly exposed part of the image. Everything else which is darker will be under-exposed as a result.
Even though you have marked 'houses' in this photo, there are still what appear to be rover tracks where you say are irrigation channels.
I dont think many people are ready to accept your idea Iceman, that the rover tracks in this picture are really something else, like irrigation channels. However, I could be wrong and maybe they can all see your point. It may be just me who has a problem with this.
Other images of the same area were taken from the same perspective six hours earlier when the sun was close to local noon. These images show details not apparent in the sunset images six hours later.
Here is a crop of a low-res compressed image that more clearly shows the terrain. Source image web page of 2P169774137EFFAAE0P2681L4M1 low-res jpg.
A Moment Frozen in Time On May 19, 2005, Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view as the sun sank below the rim of the Gusev crater on Mars. This image mosaic was taken around 6:07 on the evening of the rover's 489 Martian day, or sol. Spirit was commanded to stay awake briefly after sending that sol's data to the Mars Odyssey orbiter just before sunset. The filter combination used to take this image allows false color images to be generated that are similar to what the human eye would see, but with the colors slightly exaggerated. Because Mars is farther from the Sun than the Earth is, the Sun appears only about two-thirds the size that it appears in a sunset seen from the Earth. The terrain in the foreground is the rock outcrop "Jibsheet", a feature that Spirit investigated for several weeks. The floor of Gusev crater is visible in the distance, and the Sun is setting behind the wall of Gusev some 80 kilometers (50 miles) in the distance.
this is an image of martian sunset , not of sunrise. What is your problem with this? If we are consequent regarding to the color of soil (and the sky light scattering) then the proper colorization can be the following:
Of course I can not exclude that the Nasa's colors are more realistic although they wrote that the color image was composed from L2,L5 and L7 filtered images.
This is what I did to the image and as you can see is the color of the sky and the sun disappeared and in their place we see a landscape that would normally be too dark to give some idea about color or shape variations. This photography project is extremely difficult even for professional photographers I will therefore assume that the image of the sun rising is fixed.
More treatment is needed to sharpen the image and color changes here would be useful.
Notice there are no color changes have been made, but we see green tone in which it is supposed to be with regard to the form and placement.
Here is a perfect opportunity for those who want to discover the actual colors on Mars. The picture is not really a picture of sunrise on Mars but if it was even so, was it taken on a remarkably light-sensitive “film”. Left part of the film contains interesting information about life on Mars.