This is fun:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu77YbjTa38

Capt. D talks about the TAM and mentions Phil Plait and Bad Astronomy

He then proceeds to debunk a "Reptilian Transformation" video, that claims to show a Reptilian alien in disguise as a woman.
And in doing so he covers....

Artifacts.


Heh

See Van Rijns response above about the Compression and enjoy this outstanding video by our excellent YouTube Ambassador of rationality, Captain Disillusion

I apologize, I used NASA and should have said ESA as there photos are the ones in question.

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None to speak of

Because you're wrong. It looks just like JPEG artifacts, especially after recompression. Here's an example of the DCT blocking effect:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...px-Dctjpeg.png

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Looked carefully, didn't see a city or ruins of a city or anything not natural.
Am i now part of the conspiracy and when do i get my first pay check?

I would also add in the psychology piece:

A lot of folks here have been through experiences similar to what you are going through right now. Perception is a powerful thing, and can hold sway over us. It can be ridiculously difficult to overstep and look at things rationally. IF the pictures can be demonstrated to be ancient cities, awesome! But we as humans (and often as individuals) have gotten our hopes up more than enough times just to have them dashed again, often rather harshly. This sucks, but it doesn't have to happen repeatedly. It is experiences like this that kicked a lot of people toward these sort of communities where others can assist us in investigating things we are uncertain of. Some of us before we got here, others got here because of those things.

It is not a bad, err...unusual thing to "see" the cities or ruins or whatever. It IS a bad thing to say they ARE simply based on a handful of pictures that have a known questionable character. Our eyes are good, but not necessarily dependable. What they show us (or rather, what our brain interprets it as) is subject to manipulation in the brain simply because it tries to take unfamiliar material or experiences and make it familiar.

We (as humans in this case) get a rush out of strange sensations: high speed, heights, drugs, amusement parks, scary movies...but they are breaks FROM reality. If those are our realities we either lose interest or desensitize to them. Our brains do not like strange, non-intuitive or new, non-understood things. Because of this, it makes those otherwise unnatractive ideas or sensations into something it DOES know. Desensitization is one way. Others may be that blobs become faces; lights, no matter how reasonable, become UFOs. Hills on Mars become faces--we had a LONG and quite rewarding discussion on that a few months ago, I will see if I can dig that up.

So with all that in mind, we think maybe, just maybe this is another case of the same. Forgive us for not turning over our understandings of the Universe on a few pictures that are heavily associated with more mundane explanations. If you or someone else find pictures or other data to verify your hypothesis that these are ruins, awesome! But we aren't bandwagon jumpers. And not just more JPGs, but the same exact artifacts from another perspective. That would be a good start, though hardly proof positive.

In a way it may seem sad, but in the end it is the easiest way for us to process information and stay sane. And stay right. Ha, not always right. But never wrong. Someone smart said that and it wasn't me, but it nicely wraps up the skeptic mentality.

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None to speak of

I don't think you read a word I wrote. I already have taken the links and looked for myself. Now you go back and look and see if you can find that flea (about 4 o'clock from the arrow point below the 79 numerals) and you tell me whether that's an artificial construct. It is not about whether the ESA images are bogus: it's about whether what you see in them is bogus.

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Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately, it kills all its pupils. Hector Berlioz

"To complete the picture all the photons can be seen to be synchronising friction on and off throughout the overall cone which itself is synchronised to the equal and opposite reaction of equilateral triangulation"... by a scientificator in ATM, too priceless to be lost to posterity.

Don't forget "adjust brightness/contrast." At least, that was what they said here:

http://media.photobucket.com/image/c...TwoDi.jpg?o=11

Which basically was manipulated to emphasize image artifacts and ignore everything else. They essentially admitted to that ("Steps to emphasize forms/structures in images" according to the page).

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

-ManOnMoon-
Thank you. I mean it.
-vanRijn-
There are .tif images that are close to ten megabytes each on the ESA site. Are the photos compressed into .jpegs in the bird, then decompressed on the ground and recoded into .tif format for "high resolution" distribution? If so, why are the 10Meg .tiff images so much better than the same image in .jpeg? If the city ruins are .jpeg artifacts, why are the ruins also visible in the .tif files? If they are artifacts of the process, how come the two different views of Hale show exactly the same "compression artifacts" exactly rotated to fit the geography and resolving the exact same features from the two differing angles? It doesn't make sense. The .jpeg compression artifacts would have to be nailed to the planet surface for this to happen.

As far as your peeling me over style, I can't afford to allow semantics to get in the way here. Yeah right, you say tomato, I say tomatoe...big deal.

It's nearly three and I've started fires all over the place. Tomorrow I'll master linking and we can all have another alligator wrestle.

Fine,so what is the evidence? If the features are real they should also be visible in other images of Mars as well.

Who has said these photos are a hoax?

"Contraversy" implies that there is some credible discussion about "ruins" in Hale crater. There isn't any, there are a claims by a few fringe dwellers. Not that there has not been study of Hale crater, there have been quite few, for many reasons But ruins are not among them.

Here is the first problem. The grid pattern is visible only in colour images. For example the vertical colour image http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/...ater_hires.jpe colour JPEG or the two oblique projected images http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/...leCrater_H.jpg (looking NW) and http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/...leCrater_H.jpg (looking W). They are not visible in B&W images such as the JPEG (http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/...leCrater_H.jpg). So they are clearly something introduced in the processing o0f the images to make a colour composite. They are called compression artifacts. You can see similar things on Goggle Earth - http://maps.google.com.au/maps?hl=en...03744&t=h&z=18

Just to cross check we can look at higher resolution images of the same area, for example MOC images like: http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/ab1_.../M0401179.html

http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/m07_.../M0904718.html

http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/e07_.../E1200358.html

http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/e13_.../E1300286.html

http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/e07_.../E1004264.html

No ruins in these images.

It is not a hoax, it is what happens when people see what they want to see. Some people want there to be ruins on Mars, and so they see them, even when they are very obviously the result of the processing methodology.

Do you really think that if there were ruins in these images that it would not be trumpted as the greatest archaeological discovery of all time? Finding Ruins on Mars would mean that exploration budgets would be tripled over night.

Jon

Thanks Billy.

Also, for anyone interested, I hunted down the thread of which I spoke somewhere earlier. It is in one of my posts, all of which are several paragraphs. I do know what they say, but am not going to hunt down the sentence referring to this thread.

In that thread (almost exactly one year!) we discussed Mars, the face, lighting, paraploedia (sp?), and perception. I've seen Bad Guardian in and out a few times, though not really as a regular. Check it out, I think one will find many parallels between this thread (developing) and that one (well hashed out).

Link if you missed the other.

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None to speak of

This link should take you to the original ESA photo. You'll, of course have to download it yourself. The pixel resolution is about 40 meters on the ground. Go down an have a look in the lower left-hand corner just at the base of the mountain range (Can anyone tell me the name of that mountain range?)

http://www.esa.int/esa-mmg/mmg.pl?b=...start=2&size=b

As has been pointed out the pictures are compressed as JPEG before they are transmitted.

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You see, Billy, we've gone through all this before. Many people have weighed what you are citing as evidence and found it wanting. It's a known fact that there are compression artifacts in the images. It's a known fact that the described manipulation creates more of them. Are you disputing this?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Not only are most images JPEG compressed before transmission to Earth...this is not a photo. It is a height field generated from an overhead photo and ground ranging data, hence it being a side view of a square plot of land with edges that follow the terrain. So you have the JPEG compression of the image map (and possibly of the height data itself), the tessellation artifacts of the height field, and more JPEG artifacts not aligned with the artifacts on the image map. This is why some of the same artifacts appear in two "perspective views"...those views are synthesized from the same artifact-ridden data.

There's a few more tell-tales of it being a height field, especially in the close-up view. Looking at peaks and edges, there is some geometry that is clearly represented and other geometry with fuzzy detail. Mountains have sharp peaks and sides, and blurry surfaces. There's also shading from the original image that is not seen in the geometry of the surface it is mapped onto. And that isn't a hoax either, it's just one of the things stereo imaging is useful for...though the nature of the image certainly should have been noted more clearly.

I just looked at the last linked image and can't find the features you are referring to. It's just terrain. What's am I supposed to be looking for? There's certainly nothing that hints of artificial construction.

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Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately, it kills all its pupils. Hector Berlioz

"To complete the picture all the photons can be seen to be synchronising friction on and off throughout the overall cone which itself is synchronised to the equal and opposite reaction of equilateral triangulation"... by a scientificator in ATM, too priceless to be lost to posterity.

I think you went "deeper" than I intended.

Just scroll down about half-way on that page, and check out her "Snake Mom".

I'm interested to know if you agree with Wiloas' interpretation of that image.

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Oh but this is so much better than just a Billy-fry. You guys are really coming up with what I need to know and thank you ever so much.
Over the next couple of days I'll get into what each and every one of you has posted and study-up. If I come up with more oddities (such as the large pyramid in the middle left hand side of the Hale image which I still can't dismiss) believe me I'll come running back. Probably later this afternoon.

-ThorKill2- Your quote from the 'scientificator' just floors me. It's just about one of the funniest things I've sen in a long time..Thanks!

Do not forget, I put forth a "direct question" In the form of a challenge Here.

I am going to hold you to it and require a response to it.

-pzkpfw- I can't quite wrap my head around the 'Snake Mom'. I wish the quality of these images was better. So much speculation gives me headaches and if they can read a license-plate from space, why can't we get better images from Mars? It would put so much of this to rest.
And I don't buy the ape contemplating life in the desert either.

So much speculation?!
Look who's talking!

They can't, unless they are bloody big plates.

Nick

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--
Nick Theodorakis

OK. I owe everybody a beer.
Having chased every link provided here, I can se that something's amiss.
But _how_ did this happen? Why can I get the same results in the oblique .jpeg images and ..... what the heck's going on here?
I've been awake for two days hammering on this and I feel like some kind of gullible idiot.
The 'two different views' photos are so doggone hard to dismiss, but now the 'tank lying on its side' at the upper right hand corner is beginning to look like a carbon resistor with its leads cut and bent.
I need some sleep.
THANK YOU ALL.

WOW!!!

Dare I hope?


Very Honorable post BillyG, looking forward to what you have to say after a good nights rest.

If you mean this:
http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/...leCrater_H.jpg
and this:
http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/...leCrater_H.jpg

then as I mentioned before...those aren't two different photos. That's one photo mapped onto a height field, and then rendered from two different viewpoints.

The lower right of the second one clearly shows a set of JPEG artifacts rotated about 30-45 degrees (aligned with the square ground plot), blurred, and following the contours of the terrain. There's also some grid artifacts from the height field itself. The JPEG artifacts and those height field artifacts in the image map will stay aligned to the ground as the viewpoint moves around. The additional JPEG artifacts from compressing the rendered image for the web only muddle things further, especially when you strip out the color data that makes the JPEG artifacts so easy to identify.

Here are a couple examples of images of things on Mars taken from orbit. Not great, but examples still.



From Bad Astronomy

From the Planetary Society

I was looking for a slightly more detailed article that included this picture. And a link to the MSN article from which I drew that picture.

I don't imagine research time on the orbiter is easy to get, but a strong enough hypothesis and money might help. If we can get images of landers...which are golf cart size or smaller, why not buildings and streets? (And they would have to be HUGE to meet the scale in the photo you linked to). Thank you for the link by the way. I do see some artifacts, and with a little imagination can make them into a civilization, but not on their own.

I also see the thing you refer to as a pyramid, which would be GINORMOUS and should be slightly clearer if it is actually 'something' rather than a hazy sort of blob.

shoot, battery is about to die, hang on.

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None to speak of

Just to clarify, I am NOT proposing the artifacts ARE buildings or anything other than artifacts.

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None to speak of

Good Morning.
OK. Let's assume that it's just plain loopy to asume that the details in the Hale image that are artifacts of the process are remnants of folks who once lived there. But the odd shapes in the images are there. I've seen them; you've seen them; they've seen them; he, she or it has seen them.

But they are _not_ ruins of a vanished civilization (darn it). All together now?

What are they? Why are they only in one place? Why do they look so much like something deliberate? Howcome there are so many different shapes? Why aren't there imaging artifacts evenly distributed over the entire photo?

In my original question, I allow for the possibility of tampering on the part of some really talented prankster. Believe me, I really don't want to have to believe that Mars is other than what the _reliable_ data (such as it is) reveal because if there really is indisputable evidence of past civilizations we would have to go back and rewrite a whole buncha books and the church would be sent to the corner to sit on a high stool in a dunce cap for the remainder of the day.

But what about the hobgoblins in these photos?

-cjameshuff- has the most plausible insight, but why don't other similar geological formations show similar types of disturbances? Again, why _only_ in one location and not others?

If we're talking about the same image (not photo), the artifacts show up where there is little detail, ie largish amount of almost the same color. There are less image artifacts where there is a lot of detail. Someone with intimate knowledge of the JPEG compression protocols can probably give a thorough explanation for that, but I find it perfectly acceptable that such areas of an image compress in a different way than "busy" areas.

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Because JPEG artifacts don't get evenly distributed. You get ringing along sharp edges, blocks with color casts, a kind of posterization effect on smooth gradients, and all of these are dependent on color as well as brightness. And of course, in some places they are easier to distinguish from the image itself than in others. The height field artifacts in those two images show up most strongly in particular types of geometry. Depending on the way the triangle mesh is created from the height data, certain smooth slopes can end up showing the tessellation artifacts more strongly than others. And it's quite possible that the height field data was JPEG compressed as well, which would lead to more artifacts. It's even likely that both depth and color images were composites of multiple JPEG images, resulting in multiple JPEG artifacts being overlapped or cropped at seams.

Each little tile of land in the height field is likely composed of two triangles. If one corner is raised, the pair of triangles will be creased. If that corner is one of the two belonging to just one of the triangles, the crease will be across the slope, generally more closely following the actual geometry and giving a smooth image. If it is one of the two corners shared by both triangles, the crease will form a ridge up the slope, something that generally produces highly visible artifacts. Differences in surface color, pattern, and illumination will make this show up more in some areas than in others, though I don't know if this image actually incorporates simulated lighting or just relies on the source image for it.


Other images may be using source data with different resolution and compression settings, and different compression afterward. And as I said above, even with the same resolution and compression settings, the artifacts will be drastically different with different images and on different geometry.

These images simply are not useful for the type of thing you're trying to use them for. There's some craters, some rocks, some dunes, some interesting erosion patterns...but you're getting hung up on tiny little details that the image isn't even capable of faithfully representing. You're staring at noise and trying to see something, and given the brain's pattern matching capability, of course you'll see something, especially considering the orderly nature of some components of the noise.