Games By James Plafke May. 2, 2014 5:53 pm
No, Google Street View didn’t come to Mars (but we’re thinking about pre-writing the story anyway for when that inevitably happens). Instead, panoramic photographer Andrew Bodrov put together a Street View-like image that allows you to pan around Mars from the Curiosity rover’s point of view.
The image, in which you can zoom and pan around below, is composed of 138 individual pictures. He did a phenomenal job, because the seams are barely noticeable, unlike Street View. At a glance, you might assume the landscape is some random desert on Earth, but after carefully examining the landscape, you’ll notice there’s something alien about it. The ground has tints of blue and purple, and the sky has a weird, blurry hue.
Aside from the barren, strangely tinted landscape, the Sun appears smaller than it does on Earth, which you can see if you swing the camera up a little bit.
The images were taken on April 27 of this year with the rover’s robotic arm, onto which the camera — Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) — is mounted. The final composite image stretches 30,000 pixels wide. As you can imagine, commenters already want a flat image to be made available so the panorama can be compatible with the Oculus Rift (which is something that NASA has already worked up). If you notice, there’s no blink of light piercing up through the ground, either.
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The image, in which you can zoom and pan around below, is composed of 138 individual pictures. He did a phenomenal job, because the seams are barely noticeable, unlike Street View. At a glance, you might assume the landscape is some random desert on Earth, but after carefully examining the landscape, you’ll notice there’s something alien about it. The ground has tints of blue and purple, and the sky has a weird, blurry hue.
Aside from the barren, strangely tinted landscape, the Sun appears smaller than it does on Earth, which you can see if you swing the camera up a little bit.
The images were taken on April 27 of this year with the rover’s robotic arm, onto which the camera — Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) — is mounted. The final composite image stretches 30,000 pixels wide. As you can imagine, commenters already want a flat image to be made available so the panorama can be compatible with the Oculus Rift (which is something that NASA has already worked up). If you notice, there’s no blink of light piercing up through the ground, either.
More...
