Starship Asterisk*

Martian Chiaroscuro

Explanation: Deep shadows create dramatic contrasts between light and dark in this high-resolution close-up of the martian surface. Recorded on January 24 by the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the scene spans about 1.5 kilometers across a sand dune field in a southern highlands crater. Captured when the Sun was just 5 degrees above the local horizon, only the dune crests are caught in full sunlight. With the long, cold winter approaching the red planet's southern hemisphere, bright ridges of seasonal frost line the martian dunes.

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Just beautiful. There is a black dot in the top left corner, which would be about 6m in diameter if it were real and on the surface. But I assume it is some kind of alignment marker, or similar, applied by the camera or the post-processing. (The lighting is all wrong for it to be a party balloon: http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=33136.)

Nitpicker wrote:Just beautiful. There is a black dot in the top left corner, which would be about 6m in diameter if it were real and on the surface. But I assume it is some kind of alignment marker, or similar, applied by the camera or the post-processing. (The lighting is all wrong for it to be a party balloon: http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=33136.)

It's a bit odd, since it's not present in any of the original images. The artifact seems to have been added in the process of moving the image over to the APOD filesystem.

Looks like a giant Fingerprinted painting or something....

Very surreal...

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I presume the frost is carbon dioxide not water?

Jandotto wrote:
I presume the frost is carbon dioxide not water?

You presume correctly. (NASA refers to it as dry ice "frost").

Clearly the dot is a hole caused by a camera shy sand wurm. These Mars pictures are always my favorite APODs. Keep up the great work!

Have you noticed how much the dunes look like giant fingerprints?

Lordy me, I remember the first flyby of Mars - looked lunar, nothing but craters. Then our second mission flew by (we did two at a time in those days) and showed non-cratered terrain in the other hemisphere, and we cheered up. We've come a LONG way, baby!

These dunes have rich colors making this extraterrestrial desert pretty cool and smooth !

Have they tried a cortisone ointment on that?

And people want to go live there?