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Curiosity rover: Martian solar day 2

360cities.net

21–30 of 84 posts

Re: Curiosity rover: Martian solar day 2

#21
post #3

There is something hidden by a black square at the far end of the vehicle.

Nothing is 'hidden'— the image is a stitched panorama from many smaller images, and they didn't (yet?) transfer some of the images which only cover the rover, presumably because looking at the rover is scientifically uninteresting. The black areas are just the boundaries of the missing images.

Re: Curiosity rover: Martian solar day 2

#22

What's with the recent surge of upvotes and naïve comments about ad plastered pages that just take content from NASA? Here the picture is really small and the ads block a large percentage of it. edit: That said, NASA doesn't do a very good job with photos itself either: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/gallery-ind... edit2: Ah, nevermind, it was a flash problem! The content is certainly valuable!

These panoramas are "hand-made" from NASA's images, not just reposted content.

Yep, sorry, I see that now, had a browser problem originally...

Re: Curiosity rover: Martian solar day 2

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

North, South, East, and West?

and what's your definition of those on another planet that doesn't have a magnetic pole ? Is the "North" the "top" of the rotation - which way is the top ?? (here's a link that shows what a compass would do on the surface of Mars : http://mgs-mager.gsfc.nasa.gov/publications/grl_28_connerney... )

You know Earth's magnetic poles don't match up with its rotational poles right? They're kinda close, but the magnetic poles wander. Even though Mars (oddly) doesn't have strong magnetic poles, that doesn't mean it doesn't have poles. As for which one is north, we just pick a direction of the solar system to be "north". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poles_of_astronomical_bodies

Re: Curiosity rover: Martian solar day 2

#24

Works exceptionally well on an iPhone (appears to use accelerometer/gyroscope).

On GNex/Chrome the page just shows a flat low-res panorama and a "flash not supported" message.

Apparently 360Cities uses[1] krpano[2], a HTML5 panorama viewer on iOS devices. I tried a gyroscope example from the krpano page[3] on my GNex but it was rather buggy (jumpy and unreliable panning, only parts of the panorama visible at a time).

It seems that the fragmentation of Android devices/browsers has proven problematic for the 360cities developers. Since the krpano viewer might only work on a fraction of Android devices I can understand dropping the support for interactive viewing completely.

[1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/360cities/188tbS9Pwj4/U8gF7O...

[2] http://krpano.com/

[3] http://krpano.com/examples/10815/examples/plugin-examples/gy...

EDIT: formatting

Re: Curiosity rover: Martian solar day 2

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

North, South, East, and West?

and what's your definition of those on another planet that doesn't have a magnetic pole ? Is the "North" the "top" of the rotation - which way is the top ?? (here's a link that shows what a compass would do on the surface of Mars : http://mgs-mager.gsfc.nasa.gov/publications/grl_28_connerney... )

The orbital axis of all the planets in our solar system are roughly parallel (within 10 degrees, Mars is just under 2 degrees off ours), so it would be fair to pick a north pole at the same "end" as ours. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_inclination

Re: Curiosity rover: Martian solar day 2

#30
post #9

Absolutely great stuff. I wonder if images were processed in any way (besides stitching) or is Martian landscape/atmosphere really so bright-yellowish. I found it much easier to use navigation keys instead of click+drag (which web page suggests).

If you point at the NASA logo on the rover you will see how big the color shift is. It's supposed to be blue but it's yellow and red. Whether it's the lighting on Mars, or the camera, or post-processing to blame for this - I have no idea, but the picture doesn't look like it reflects the reality from the human eye's perspective.
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