And if you think that previous pic of clouds moving across the martian sky was cool, this one is going to have your jaw hitting the floor and shattering like a cheap vase…

Yesterday evening some images came back from Oppy which had been taken in the late afternoon, just before sunset I think. One of them caught my eye, and the eye of many other MER fans too, because it showed something…odd… something that had us all thinking “Nooooo… it can’t be… can it?!” Here, take a look… (again, you may need to click on the image to bring up the animation – and ignore the red speckling to the left, no idea what the hell that’s all about…)

See that bump, on the hump? The hump, we’re all pretty sure, is the silhouette of the Greeley Haven ridge Oppy is currently parked up on for the winter… so that means the bump is the shadow of Oppy herself.

Yes, you read that correctly: Oppy has photographed her own shadow, being cast on the floor of Endeavour crater by the setting Sun.

Told you it was special.

So, let’s add some colour, and imagine we’re standing there beside Oppy, with the Sun setting behind us. Ahead of us, on the farside of Endeavour, are the eastern hills, still burning in the sunlight, high enough to still be in its glow. But beneath us, down on the crater floor, is the shadow of the Saddleback Ridge on the summit of Cape York, with Oppy’s shadow a small, dark bump on the top of it…

Have a good day everyone…

Now, obviously that’s speeded up, a lot, but just imagine standing there beside Oppy and looking up to see those wispy bands of cloud drifting silently across the sky above Endeavour…

Actually, that turns out not to be true. As I was secretly hoping they would, the MER team have been taking images at different times of the day to bring out different structure, features and texture in the landscape. Yesterday Oppy sent back some images taken during the late afternoon at Endeavour crater, with the low Sun’s light slanting in from an angle, and the effect is quite beautiful. I had a go at stitching the images together but failed *miserably*, my ‘finished mosaic’ was so embarrassingly bad I actually deleted it straight away, so thanks to UMSF’s Tesheiner – yes, he of the fantastic maps, which will return once Oppy starts moving again I’m sure – for giving me permission to use **his** excellent mosaic of the frames…

I love those views, they really bring the landscape to life don’t they? You can see every ripple, every little dune, every rock around Oppy. Thanks, Tesh!

Thanks also to two more UMSF members, James Sorenson and UMSF founder Doug Ellison, who have given me permission to reproduce their latest images here, too. Firstly, James coloured a whole bunch of individual frames of Oppy herself, taken as the camera looked down on her deck from high above, and then stitched them together into a mosaic…

Now, clearly there’s some distortion there, just because of the viewing angle of the camera, so Doug took James’ image and transformed it into a”polar projection” which is a fancy imaging way of saying “overhead view”… here it is, and please, click on it to see the rover in all her glory, dusty and weary, but still triumphantly alive, all these years after landing on Mars…

Just gorgeous view, thanks again to my mates from UMSF for letting me use their work here on RtE.

I’ve been making some new images too, the first this colour view of part of the range of hills on Endeavour’s farside…

…and just for fun, another fanciful, martian fantasy view… wong scientifically, in so many ways, but for these images I cast scientific accuracy aside and just go for “Ooh, that’s pretty!”

Some more images came back from Oppy yesterday that allowed me to fit the final pieces of my long puzzle into place, and I spent the early hours of this morning – it kept me awake while I waited to see if a big auroral display would kick off…it didn’t… – stitching together more than a dozen different frames into a single, wide, sweeping, Big Country mosaic showing the eastern side of Endeavour Crater on the far horizon, framed by the dropping northern slopes of Cape York to the north and the summit of Cape York to the south.

It’s not very professional, I know. Others will do a lot better with the raw material – they’ll remove the dark banding between frames, blend everything in together more smoothly, flatten the horizon, enhance it to bright out subtle details and features my image doesn’t show. Some will add colour, creating a breathtakingly beautiful panorama worthy of being published in astronomy magazines and books for years to come. I’m sure there are people at NASA working away on these images right now, preparing an “official image” in real colour for a big press release, and I can’t wait to see that, and all the other pictures people will make, too, but honestly I don’t care that mine is amateurish and crude in comparison. I’m an enthusiast, as simple as that, and this has been a genuine, simple labour of love for me; I just wanted to try and get a feel for what it would be like to see Endeavour crater for real, as Oppy is seeing it. And I’m very, very pleased with how this has turned out.

So, when you see the image below, and click on it to enlarge it (you won’t see much otherwise!) I hope you’ll appreciate it for what it is, and what it shows. This is the very view you would have if you were standing beside Oppy right now; this is the very view people – tourists, sightseers, pilgrims, historians, adventurers, native born martian children on school trips, honeymooning couples, the great great great grandchildren of MER team members, archaeologists – will one day enjoy after they have made the long, long trek south from Victoria Crater, across Meridiani’s great dust desert, after they have stepped up onto Cape York at Spirit Point, and after they have walked uphill past the gaping geological wound of Odyssey Crater, past the slab-topped Tisdale 2, past all those boulders and stones on the Shoemaker Ridge, past the historic, fenced-off remains of Homestake…

So, dear reader, stand with me now beside Opportunity. Rest a gloved hand on her back – maybe wiping some dust off, gently, she could definitely do with a clean – and stare out with us across Endeavour Crater. Sweep your gaze from north to south, taking in one range of hills after another, seeing how the great crater’s floor first dips and then rises into a great low mound of dark dust before falling away again at the foot of the Tribulation range. Marvel at the sight of those craters blasted out of the slopes opposite, imagining what it would have been like to stand here and watch those impacts as they happened, to have felt the ground beneath your feet shudder and shake and convulse with the force of the meteorite impacts just 25km away. Imagine standing here, watching mushroom clouds of dust and debris rising slowly into the martian skym, casting shadows across Endeavour, then clearing to reveal new landmarks in the hills on the other side. Imagine seeing Earth shining above those distant hills, as blue as a sequin or sapphire, as beautiful as Venus appears back on Earth. Imagine seeing a bright comet above those hills, its tail arching gracefully over them, airbrushed across the delicate blue-pink sky.

Imagine standing here and watching Oppy approaching you, rolling slowly but surely up Cape York towards the Saddleback Ridge, a robot coated in orange dust, her old, tired gears whirring as soft as a whisper in the thin air…

Imagine standing here alone, on the top of a hill on Mars, with a shrunken, golden Sun shining bright above you in a caramel- and honey-hued sky, ancient rust-red rocks all around you, staring out across the crater’s floor, shaking your head inside your helmet at the breathtaking beauty of the sight…

That’s my Mars, the Mars I fell in love with as a child, the Mars that I see in my mind when I look at that orange-red ‘star’ shining above the ruins of Kendal Castle on a clear night, the Mars that I see when I look into the eyepiece of my telescope and see a tiny orange orb shimmering there, with a white dot at its pole and the hint of dark markings and shadings on its face.

I hope you like it.

Seriously, that’s a stunning view, isn’t it? I can’t render that in colour yet, because one of the frames on the right hasn’t come down as a full filter set yet, but soon, hopefully.

I always find if fun to take these panoramas and stretch them vertically, which brings out the more subtle details and features on the landscape. Here’s that previous pic pulled upwards a bit… ok, a lot…!

I really love the way that stretching these panoramas brings out the bowl-like nature of Endeavour, and shows that central ‘mound’ which dominates the interior of the crater.

Something else that’s very interesting is to compare our view of Endeavour’s farsode now with how it looked back when Oppy arrived. The next link will take you to an official NASA image, a panorama of Endeavour’s farside which was taken on September 13th last year. Just look at how muggy the view is, there was a *lot* more dust in the atmosphere then than there is now, I think…

http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_instrument/2715B_P2284.html

More soon!

Almost three and a half years later, after driving across kilometres of unforgiving desert, over, round and through dunes of dust the colour of cinnamon and rust, and past countless meteorites and boulders sculpted into what will one day be hailed as the first martian works of art, Opportunity is standing on the rim of Endeavour, staring out over its vast floor, looking at those very same hills again. (click the image below to enlarge it)

Just take a moment to think about that. When I did, part of me – a big, angry, fists-balled-up-in-fury-and-frustration part of me, I’ll admit – felt frustrated and mad as hell that it’s a robot (albeit a magnificent, incredibly successful one) seeing this majestic vista instead of a person, or a group of people. But then I told myself that I should be grateful, and I am, that we’re here when this incredible journey of scientific exploration is taking place, and that the pictures ohe rover is taking are shared with us so freely and so quickly, too, allowing us all to virtually stand alongside Oppy as she takes in this wonderful, wonderful view.

Every rover enthusiast, MER team member and space-mad journalist knows that there will come a day when Oppy doesn’t phone home as usual, and that we’ll all have to face the fact that the MER adventure is over. But that day isn’t today. Seeing these images, today, at least in our imaginations, we can stand beside Opportunity, raise a gloved hand to shield our eyes from the midday martian Sun, gaze out across Endeavour and marvel at the sight of ancient, crater-pocked mountains jutting up into the pink martian sky.

Hopefully the next batch of images will show That Crater blasted out of the tallest of the farside mountains..!

Note: also of interest on that pic is our first good look at “The Notch” or “The Dagger” (about time THAT had a real name, too!) cut out of the northern edge of Cape York. Will Oppy roll down there to take a closer look, hoping to see and study some layering to learn about the past of this part of Mars, or will she head south after winter in search of those precious phylosillicates..? Time will tell.

So far so good! But what I’m really looking forward to is seeing that panorama expand to the right, where the “good stuff” – i.e the highest farside hills, with their craters – is waiting to be photographed. Hope those pics come in soon, I really want to see that big oval crater in full detail now – maybe when that happens they’ll finally get around to naming the ******* thing!!!

As nice as that view is – and it is VERY nice – I’m impatient to see the view even further to the right, where there’s that high, rounded mountain with the big oval crater on its face. Now that will be a treat, seeing that in colour..! Maybe in another couple of days.

In the meantime, here’s an image couresty of Michael Howard, the brains behind the awesome Midnight Mars Browser software, showing Oppy’s approximate position and orientation at Greeley Haven…

And what can Oppy see from there? Well, if she glances over her shoulder, so she’s looking down the north end of Cape York, she can see this… (click to enlarge and thus enjoy the full 3dee goodness…)

More soon… but before I hit “Publish”, can I thank all of you for being here to celebrate “Road to Endeavour’s” 400th post? 400.. wow… I honestly didn’t think I’d still be writing this little travelogue now, but I’m delighted I am!

And delighted to have you along for the ride, too.