Astroblog: Still more Mars VMC camera animations: High cloud!

Saturday, September 06, 2008

Still more Mars VMC camera animations: High cloud!

Over at the Mars Express VMC camera site, they have images of an "unknown artefact". I'm pretty sure the artefact is a cloud, with its shadow. In the 3 D image to the left it's pretty clear that the object is much higher than the surface (click to enlarge). In this animated gif, you can see the cloud drift away from a group of 3 craters (use a line drawn from the bottom crater to the nearby peak as a reference), and its shadow grows smaller as the sun rises.
(in the animation the streak to the centre left and the parallel bright blobs that turn up at the end are camera artefacts)

Also have a look at this colour composite of Mars created by Ted Stryk, pretty amazing, and Mike Malaska has a great animation of clouds near the terminator.

You can see detailed descriptions of how I made these images here.

UPDATE: My images have been posted at the VMC website, along with Gordan Ugarković's great colour images.

Labels: anaglyph, animation, Mars, Mars Express VMC, webcam