Planet Four Talk

looks like tiger spots, lots of blothces

  • adam_l by adam_l

    i think these are blotches soso many to record correctly anyone with any more detailed information on what these are is great...

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  • Portyankina by Portyankina scientist

    These are definitely blotches. If someone tagged all of them, my great-great-great thanks!

    Anya

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  • chrisbayes by chrisbayes

    i did a few like this.
    tagged them as #peppered

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  • michaelaye by michaelaye scientist

    the big picture here is this: This is a field of blotches, so a lot of jet activity but without any winds around to create fan streaks. Does it mean they were really fast eruptions? Or does it mean there is rarely wind here? In any case, these blotch fields are not very common, so to map them out and have a total number of eruptions and covered area will be helpful to learn if this area is somehow special either in weather terms or in terms of geo-morphology, meaning is the ice cover somehow different here.
    Oh yes, one of the biggest FAQ for these images: Whenever there are clearly fans visible in an image, the whole area must be covered by CO2 ice (with maybe a very thin mix of some water molecules around), even so the image tint is reddish. Red is actuallly the most sensitive detector of the HiRISE camera, so when something looks reddish, but has fans, that is normally a sign of an early spring image, with not a lot of light. All these images are contrast-stretched to maximize the visual information.

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  • michaelaye by michaelaye scientist

    I didn't explain that very well:
    If it's early in the spring, not much light is around, so it's in general very dark. That in turn means, for the 3 color channels the HiRISE camera has, the RED channel will have the biggest so called signal-to-noise ratio, therefore it will get the most dominant value-area of the resultant color image, just because it can see best in low-light conditions. That's why the reddish images should come from early times spring scenarios, and even so they are reddish, they are actually showing completely ice-covered scenarios.

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  • MGHogue by MGHogue

    " these blotch fields are not very common, so to map them out and have a total number of eruptions and covered area will be helpful . . ."

    Unfortunately Firefox & IE seem to crash after a certain number of objects/memory is reached - at least on my PC. About 50 or so, then all the data is lost. I've regretfully had to bypass these by pressing F5 (reload - thereby not contributing as an uninteresting image).

    Would it be possible for the user interface to have a tool which would 'tag' a region/area as "blotchy' or stippled - an area with many vents? I've run across areas in ice fields and "spiders" which were "interesting" - but way too many 'objects' for the system to bear. This would help us users mark these "vent fields" where they occur, would shorten the amount of time needed to do so, and would reduce computer crashes/errors, lost data and time.

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