"clipka" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> "Cousin Ricky" <ric### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
> > The redness that you see when you look at Mars in the sky is an effect created
> > by your vision due to the contrast between the sunlit Mars and the black sky.
> > The redness you see in surface images is due to Hollywood or NASA giving the
> > public what they want.  The Viking images (1976) are just plain prostitution.
>
> Which of the zillion version of them? :)
>
> Ironically, the first release of the Viking image wasn't custom-tailored to some
> specific soil color at all - instead, someone responsible for color calibration
> had thought that a greenish-brown sky looked odd...
>
> These pages look like the guy knows what he's writing about:
>
> http://www.donaldedavis.com/2002_addons/SSYCOLRS.html
> http://www.donaldedavis.com/PARTS/MARSCLRS.html

So then the difference between the rust-colored Spirit images from nasa.gov and
the glowing-lava-colored Spirit images from CNN (which presumably came from the
same space probe) wasn't my imagination.  It hadn't occurred to me (though it
should have) that people other than NASA would screw with the color balance.

Over 33 years, I recall seen only one version of the Viking images--one that's
far, far more garish than any of the images on Don Davis's Web site.

The things you learn while trying to make pretty pictures!

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