New Mars Forums

Hi all

Even amongst us humans, the colours we perceive are specific to the individual (as alluded to in this thread). The orange, pink, red, blue, etc. that I see will be very slightly different to that seen by someone else. I can go to my local DIY store and match a paint colour exactly to another and so can most people, but the colour they are actually seeing is personal to them. Luckily the difference in perception in most situations is extremely small, so pink to me is pink to you, but what 'shade' of pink?
As for the NASA image, I think I remember they described this image as 'enhanced false-color', something they don't normally do with their 'normal' 'dodgy' colour images. So I must agree with some comments on this board that this seems to be NASA saying 'Look, this is a press/public image, it's not a scientific one, we've enhanced the colours/image so that the casual observer can get a grasp of the contrasting terrain... blah'
Anyhow, that's my take on it. NASA give you the 'RAW' (mmm RAW=RAW deal?) images so that you can tinker around. The fact that they put up this image and many other tinkered-around-with images up is fine by me. Think about how many young people look at their website. Every youngster would have an image imprinted of blue skies and orange sands on Mars (actually, I say young people, but it's amazing how many older people know nothing of the MERs, Beagle2, Mars , or some people even Earth). Anyhow...
Also, colour images are made up by black'n'white cameras that, for a lot of the colour images, use filters in the infrared or non-human-friendly wavelengths.

Let us not be too hard on NASA on this point. At least they put two serviceable rovers down there (up there). And even if they couldn't immmediately tell whether they were standing in 'mud' or 'salt' as they did initially, it's a fair effort. Ironically poor ol' Beagle2 could tell you if it was salt and also which supermarket it came from...

Ian