These Skies Have Been Colorized (part 2)
Instead of simply assembling the color images, NASA is faking the color of the sky
Now that I had a clean copy of the image using the same filters that NASA had used to create their image, it would be a simple matter to find the differences.
For comparison, I overlaid the NASA "Burns" image and my unedited color image. This would yield some very interesting results. Here is the image.
First, it is very clear that this is indeed the same image data. The features and terrain all match absolutely perfectly. But the two things that stick out are as follows:
1. the Burns image has a very blurry edge to the ground, where the newly assembled image has a sharp horizon
2. the sky in the left portion is grainy, as are all the sky images taken by the rovers. But the Burns image shows a completely flat, uniform sky- no grain! That is because it was "airbrushed" over using a flat, uniform color, and contains absolutely no original image data.
In other words, somebody had to knowingly "corral" the sky, select a color by hand, paint it over the corralled area, and then make it match the ground. This is why the horizon is blurry in the Burns image- they used the blur tool to make the sky match the fake color they picked.
So while they complained of the time it took to produce an accurate color image, in fact, they were taking much more time to FAKE the color of the sky. It takes far longer to recolor the sky to your whim and then make the ground match, than it does to actually do the honest work and assemble the image as it stands.
Can I substantiate this claim? Yes.
| This is a small selected
area magnified to 300%. You can see that this is the overlay area
that includes the horizon. This is directly from the image above.
See the grainy pattern in the blue sky area? That is the true data that the imager returned. See the flat brown sky on the right? That is the fake sky that NASA edited in. Also take note of the sharp, natural horizon line on the left, and the blurred, fake horizon line on the right. This is trickery in its worst form- this is supposed to be "true and accurate data", and it proves that the sky is manipulated. |
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| Now I took this sample and
selected a spot of the brown sky at random. I then did a
"selective replacement" of that one color value with red.
Normal images will have thousands of different shades in them, not a single
uniform shade. What happened?
The painted area corresponds to a brown chroma value of 167:134:89, which I replaced with red to show the blocky nature of the paint job. The human eye cannot resolve such features but the computer can, and this is clearly a hand painted fake. A single perfect mass of absolutely uniform color never shows up in any photograph or digital image. It should have the same texture and randomness that the true image shows. |
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I then assembled the image using the proper filters for the most accurate color image first. This is very close to what the human eye would see if it were present on Mars at the time the image was taken. In my opinion, this is the truest color image of Mars' sky that we can get, given the lack of illumination and white level references. (Note that even a cheap throw-away camera has a white balance circuit, but the rovers do not.)
This is the truest color representation that can be made, given the lack of illumination reference data. It is constructed from filters L4, L5, and L7. Note a faint pinkish cast to the sky, due to very fine Martian dust. But even with this present, the sky is still overwhelmingly blue, and not muddy brown or red. This image is scaled down to 70% of the original size.
This is the best color image that can be assembled from the data at hand. Take note of the faint pink cast to the sky, due to the presence of some dust. That is not too unusual; we see similar skies on Earth in the desert. And further refinements of the calibration reveal an even bluer sky, as the red tends to dominate less of the image when the balance is corrected.
Conclusion
NASA has denied "colorizing" the sky, but here it is clearly and plainly obvious that this is false- they have indeed deliberately set out to change the color of the sky on Mars, for whatever purpose, I cannot say. But any person with a modicum of photographic skills can overlay the raw images and make color pictures of their own. And while this may not yield the "perfect" picture of the Martian sky, it absolutely rules out that muddy brown or garish orange that we have been forced to see for all these months.
Here is an excellent paper on color calibration on Mars, involving the earlier Viking and Pathfinder missions.
UPDATE: I began checking the skies starting at the beginning of the press release images on the NASA/JPL site and found that (so far) except for one early image, every single sky had been selectively colored over and was a fake. This is borne out by the fact that not one image shows the noise grain that exists in every real image taken by a camera or a digital imager. This noise grain is a result of quantum mechanics and can never be eliminated from any natural image. This is absolute proof that every one of these skies has been intentionally edited to change the color and nature of the images.
The single image showing grain was manipulated at the frame level to appear pink, but this altered the ground appearance as well. Apparently, this was too time-consuming and so the fakery was scaled down to something that looked similar but could be done more rapidly and easily. However, this is still a lie intentionally passed off to the very public that pays for this program.
A full and detailed report will soon be posted here.