Alien Anomalies

The production of a white-balanced colour-difference view throws up many surprises that cannot be realized in the original downloaded image. It allows the viewer to see the colour-differences between objects and enhances our ability to recognize certain shapes that are on the surface.

In this view I have highlighted many of the individual shapes or groups of shapes that appear to have structural form. The image was darkened slightly and I have placed an ellipse around many of the structural shapes but there are many more. See if you can spot any of them.

This view is the area just above the yellow rectangle as seen in the image above. If your interested in finding out what real martian structures look like, this view should satisfy your curiosity but you will have to observe very carefully as many of the structural objects are very small. Some really stand out and are more recognizable than others. You will probably notice that there is also a form of designed infrastructure. There could possibly be tracks or roads but at present these are hard to identify as a much closer view would be required to determine if there are any.

I have used a little shadow enhancement (3%) to improve the edge definition of the object detail especially the lighter detail that is obscured in the original downloaded image. I have not placed any marks on the image to highlight the structural features as many of them are self-evident. This is a jpg image file saved from a png version.

I enlarged the browser image by 300% as the view is derived directly from the NASA/JPL source file and then saved the displayed browser view as a png file thereby reducing the number of image artefacts considerably. I then did a screen capture of the enlarged view and saved it as a png file so that further work could be carried out on a much more decent image.

You are quite correct in saying that a png file will still display the image artefacts if saved from a jpg file but for the close up view shown above this procedure was not used.

No, I dont think I explained properly. you cannot display an image in a browser and then take a screen shot of it. Unless the original image is a lossless one, there will still be compression artifacts. Many photo display programs smooth out the pixels unless you tell them not to. This also causes anomalies which are not even in the original. Your browser will most probably be doing this and distorting the image further from the original - unless you can clearly see the pixel squares as you zoom in. Most NASA jpg images cannot be enlarged very much before the pixels are so large as to make the image unrecognisable.

Browsers are not supposed to be optimised for image viewing. They work but are not nearly as good as an image program which is designed to be used to display images. Some programs are better than others and free ones which we all probably use are not normally as good as ones you pay for.

Screen capture programs can only display what the screen is showing and screens are notoriously BAD at displaying high definition - unless you have a specialised screen and the better ones cost hundreds or thousands. It depends on the element size of the rgb pixels of the screen. OK, these days they are quite good but normally people have screens which are a couple of years old. Obviously we all have to do the best we can with what we have, but I am just commenting on what I have learned on my journey searching for anomalies.

So, the browser image displayed from an original NASA jpg file will be smoothed and will have compression artifacts at part of it. Taking a screenshot of this and saving it in png format will not make the original any better. Once the detail has gone, it is gone forever. Smoothing, blurring the compression artifacts, then sharpening as you do, and taking screenshots of the image on the screen will only serve to make the artifacts worse and make you think there is something there when there is not. The reality is that we very rarely get a picture which shows anything at all but a 'maybe' or a 'possibly'.

In a way, I can understand what the anomaly-deniers say because we anomaly-hunters do not have good photos to start with, we can only make them worse by our manipulations - and I am as bad as anyone for this because I get excited at finding anomalies too.

Here is the same view which was downloaded and saved as a jpg file.

The section as shown above was cropped in Paint Shop Pro to a width of 157 pixels then resized to 921 pixels.

This image is the raw saved jpg image and no adjustments have been made.

As a matter of interest, compare the object detail in this view with the detail in the colour image shown above.

...But if you save a jpg image as a png image, you will still get the original detail (plus the jpg compression artifacts) wont you? Just by saving the image as a png does not somehow magically make the artifacts go away.

most jpg formats are lossy algorithms and so once the detail has gone, it is always gone and will never appear again. You understand this right?

Hate me for saying this but I still think most of your close-up image is jpg artifacts. There may be some other stuff in there as well, (because as you know I believe in little people too) but unless you start with a losslessly saved image you are going to lose detail each time it is saved with any compression at all.

The very close view shown here has not had any colours added. The colours you see are the near-natural colours of the object detail. 

All the colours are present in the Curiosity mastcam images. 

The colour saturation for this image has been increased to show the different colours of the surface objects.

I know what I can see in this image but do you see anything that is recognizable?

Do you see any towers, spires or geometrical shapes that could possibly resemble tiny structural formations?

Here is the original resized image.

I have placed a yellow rectangle around the area as shown in the above image.

Ref:  http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00370/mcam/0370ML0015160050108712E01_DXXX.jpg