Nice photo from NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit:
(Source: [u]NASA Earth Observatory[/u])
Ooooooooooooooooooooooo.
Truly astonishing.
Roger
It’s interesting to realise that Mars has no clouds.
And why does the sun appear white?
It’s most likely due to a combination of the color filters in the rover’s camera and the composition of the martian atmosphere. (If you need more detail than that, I’m afraid you’ll have to ask someone at NASA. 
)
Thank you.
Oh, thank you again.
Meh.
Looks like the smog from my old workplace on the 36th floor in downtown Chicago.
Seriously - that’s extremely cool! Thanks.
:roll: You people will believe anything. Haven’t you seen Capricorn One?
Probably Dust, no housekeeping done this week
D
Well it certainly is spectacular - think I will make it my desktop for a while.
Ian
Notice the size of the solar disc. Really gives you an idea of how much farther away Mars is from the sun. With the thin Martian atmosphere there’s probably less refractive distortion.
Cool picture but it kind of reminds me of a warm very hazy humid sunset on Lake Erie!
My wish is that we as a race get more daring in our space exploration and just go! Yes it is expensive, yes lives will be lost, and yes some may never return or come back, much like how we explored and settled our planet. I have never been able to live on the shore of a lake or an ocean for long without wanting to go and see what’s over the horizon.
On my kayaking trips in the past to the shores of Alaska, Newfoundland, Arctic and in Norway, the most beautiful moment was when I pushed off to start the day knowing that I will never be back at that same spot I started my day!
Thanks for posting the lovely picture.
MakrB
Sources of light many times brighter than their surroundings - like the sun - usually appear white in digital photography because they saturate the color-space.
The true color of the sun might have been, on a analog scale of 0-100 best represented as 99.99 red / 99.99 green / 99.98 blue (in other words, ‘very, very bright yellow’) but when you convert this into 0-255 digital scale it all rounds up to 255 red, 255 green, 255 blue.
There are ways to work around this if you’re deliberately taking a picture of the sun, but I expect the mars rover sends back information on a pretty flat scale. If we put a professional photographer down there, we’d get a more color saturated picture.
PS: Had to download the picture and check the actually consistency of the sun pixels - they run green-to-purple, actually, the opposite of what you’d expect. There may also be an atmospheric effect involved. Nonetheless, once all the factors are above 250, you’re pretty much looking at varieties of off-white, but I find it curious that it’s neither saturated nor tinged yellow. Of course, it may be the fault of jpeg encoding. That sun is only a handful of pixels against a cyan sky.
Checking the _lrg version, there -are- some bright yellow (255 Red 255 Green 250 Blue) pixels in that version. But most are not.
I still think this is the BEST picture I’ve seen of Mars:
I love it!
Not clouds like we normally have anyway. Not much water vapor there, but lots of dust. Same kind of wind patterns that create storms though. Lots of evidence of massive tornados (other photos) leaving scars on the surface that continually change.
Very cool stuff!