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Originally posted by Emily Lakdawalla at The Planetary Society Weblog
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It's easy to forget that color images from space are almost never taken all at once, in one snapshot. Nearly all cameras sent to space have monochrome detectors. To obtain color images, they have to take a photo of the same spot at least three times, each time with a different-color filter placed in front of the lens. [....] Do you see what I'm getting at here? That weird little twisty piece of dark rock that looks like a humanoid figure stood perfectly still while the three images were taken, between 11:58:53 and 12:00:13 local time at Spirit's landing site. [....] Before Spirit spends the time taking the numerous images required for a Pancam panorama (this particular panorama took 154 images, four each from 36 different pointings), the rover usually takes a quick-and-dirty version of the same panorama through its lower-resolution Navigation Cameras. The Navcam version of the panorama was captured fully three days earlier than the Pancam version and you can see that Bigfoot is in exactly the same position on sol 1,364 as it was on sol 1,367.
Such... is the respect paid to science that the most absurd opinions may become current, provided they are expressed in language, the sound of which recalls some well-known scientific phrase
James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79)
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