Mars is colourful. NASA are altering photos.

[styley]

Some stuff you read and it's hard to know whether to believe it or not, but why would NASA do what it's accused of here. "http://www.libertythink.com/totalinformation/B lueMars.htm"

[Loosehead]

It's all a consipracy by George W, he's going to invade Mars next.

[andrea81]

Probably to make it look pretty for books and papers. They air brush celebs all the time!

[heathfield]

There was a programme on TV the other day where graphic artists were interviewed about those wonderful colour pictures of galaxies and nebulae taken by the Hubble telescope.

It turns out that, despite Kodak's best efforts, there's actually very little colour in these galactic objects. Also, the photos taken using visible light alone can be fairly unimpressive. So the infra-red and ultraviolet images are usually added to produce a bigger and better picture. But where do the colours from the infra-red and ultra-violet photos come from? Quite simply, these graphics guys are employed to use their imaginations, and add faked colour to give these pictures the 'wow' factor before they're publicly released.

[andrea81]

Well in makes things more interesting. More people wanting to be astonemers?

[WaldoMcFroog]

As a very quick and dirty experiment, I took the 'Earth' shot of the sundail, bunged it in Photoshop and added a red layer. I set the red layer to 50% opacity, and experimented with different layer types. Difference produced an effect not entirely dissimilar to what the conspiracy theory website above has.

It's almost as though taking a photograph in an environment where the light has a red quality explains the discrepancy...

However, a more pertinant point is that the colour images are built up by compositing muliple images taken via the same camera with filters on them. Therefore, there is an inevitable element of colour balancing to produce the colour images you see. It took me about two minutes on the NASA site to find this out (http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/edr_fil ename_key.html), but apparently this isn't worthy of mention on your paraniod woo woo's site.

Of course, it's much more likely that communist aliens are manipulating our minds. ;-)

[heathfield]

So, Waldo, what's with the foggy/fuzzy versus sharply detailed pix? Definitely conspirators at work!
The first Mars landers had colour charts placed where the on-board cameras could view them. This allowed correction for true colours to take place back on Earth. That's how they found out the sky on Mars is actually pink.

[andrea81]

does it matter, more children are becoming interested in science and they look at wonderful pictures from all over the galaxy. Put it in black and white and it's not too inspiring.

I can't see why changing colours on a photo is a conspiracy, what are they conspyring to do?

[Loosehead]

The colours are not totally false they are used to enhance areas that are barely visible or invisible to enhance the picture they are amplifying what is there not actually adding anything.

The original pictures of mars where taken by mistake with a red filter so the sky looked blue, once corrected the true image is revealed.

[Sequin]

The anomaly shown at the bottom of the linked page looks more like Richard Nixon to me - another Martian face!