Color Images from Mars Rovers
by Bob Webster
Thanks to Bob Webster for making these images available. They are recombinations of images with different colored filters. All images are courtesy of NASA/JPL and in the public domain in the United States.
Mars Attacks!
I was browsing the NASA web site for photos from the Mars rovers, but most of them are black and white. Then I noticed they have the raw images posted that can be combined into color photos, so I combined a bunch of them into "living color." Here they are:
| [Mars in Color, from “Opportunity”] |
| [Opportunity Photos] |
| [Mars in Color, from “Spirit”] |
| [Spirit Photos] |
The color is not perfect on these, but it should be in the neighborhood. There are a lot of variables. The cameras are calibrated differently from time to time, there are different bandwidths available in different images, and the sun is at different angles.
In these photos, 3 to 6 images were taken, one after another, using different bandwidth filters. There may be 5 minutes pass from the first to the last image, so a shadow may move a little bit during that time. An interesting effect of this is an occasional rainbow strip on the edge of shadows.
The image file names include information such as camera type, time taken, location, etc. Here is the full info: