Red – and slightly less red – Mars…

So, while waiting for the latest images to come back from Opportunity (where will she have driven to since the last downlink? Closer to the gully? Down onto the Plain? Can’t wait to find out!) I decided to have another go at the view from the other day.

Why?

Well, I’m aware that, compared to the images being created by other – far more skilled – Mars rover fans, like Jason Major and James Sorenson to name just two, my images can look a bit too red, a bit too “Hollywood Mars” sometimes. Other people produce views which are more muted, less saturated than mine. And that’s ok. I’ve said from the start that my images are not meant (unless otherwise stated) to be faithful, accurate portraits of Mars. They are not “what you would see if you were there” depictions of the martian landscape. Rather, my images are essentially how *I* see and feel Mars, in my head and in my heart. I try not to go too overboard, of course; I never pump up the colour to a migraine-inducing shade of”Total Recall red”, and I don’t go too far the other way and make Mars look like a Doctor Who quarry that’s been “colourised” to make it a stomach-heavingly godawful shade of bile green/diarrhoea brown/pus yellow either. I just try to make pictures that, well, do Mars justice, you know? Pictures that are my own personal thank yous to the incredible MER mission and the men and women who run it.

So, just for a bit of fun – and to see what my images would look like if I reined myself in a bit – I had another go at my most recent panorama, processing the filtered black and white images with a little less enthusiasm, trying to emulate the results achieved by others, and here’s what came out…

What do you think? Better? More realistic? You can’t really tell unless you see v1 and v2 together, so let’s do that…

Personally, seeing them together like that, I still prefer v1. I don’t know… somehow it just looks more “martian”, but again that might just be because that’s how I see it in my head and feel it in *here*. I’d be interested in your views anyway.

Right, let’s see if any new images have come down while I’ve been writing this…