It seems that the "first" color image is not the real first... and it seemse that NASA lies again.
Look at the attached color image. It contains three part-images: the first one (left side) is the public "first" color image of Curiosity, the second (in the middle) is not displayed and the third is the photo of the descendent Curiosity.
This 3-splitted images is visible in the first 0.5 sec during loading the website of Curiosity and later only the first part of it is displayed as "first" color image of Curiosity. If you are skill and enough quick you can catch it during this short 0.5 sec by "print screen" function (pressing ctrl+alt+prt scr keys).
Look at the second part-image. It shows a martian landscape with soil, some low ridges and a relatively high hill on the horizone (do not forget that the color camera of Curiosity has only about 15 grad FOV), and partially also the martian sky is visible. The image shows exactly that the horizone of the martian sky (till about 5 grad over the planetar horizone) is light almost bright with some clouds, and the yellowish dust-layer is located upt o limited height over the surface.
The public "first" color image is obviously an overzoomed part of this landscape image, in addition its contour-cutting is rhomb-shaped dislike the real quadratic format.
News reports claim there are 'shutters' over the lenses to protect them from the dust after landing and they will be taken off after a few days...
That seems to excuse the bad quality, so let's see what happens when the true images start coming through. As I said before, hopefully they will be better quality than what my cell phone cam can do.
My bet is they probably will not be, but I am willing to eat crow if needs be...
