You know, all the ones that people are saying look like socket wrenches and toilet lids? The ones that they say NASA is avoiding looking at? All those accusations made today's APOD sound rather interesting. It's basically case of "hey, this looked interesting, so we went to check it out".

Which, of course, is something that NASA never does, because otherwise it will blow the whole conspiracy wide open.

Countdown to miniature Martian gondoliers beginning now...

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I don't know if it's the weathering or what, but the shading and coloration on a fair number of those pictures (including the one above, but more some of the greyscale ones) makes them look almost like negative images to me. I guess it's the way it's darker near the top, when we'd usually expect to see darker near the bottom? Does anyone else get this perception at all?

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Very much so. In fact, the bright pink band at the bottom of White Boat kind of freaks me out.

Why do you say it's pink rather than the same color as the soil it is resting on? That's the way I'm reading the color of that band.

Well the shadows are dark. So unless NASA cropped all the rocks out of the picture, put them on a new layer and inverted brightness levels.

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The pictures are beautiful. But (plaintive mode on) I wanna picture of a fossil.

I say it's pink because, to me, it's distinctly pink. It's probably due to a light dusting of brown-red soil along the white rock, but it still looks kind of freaky.

Anybody notice the martian fossil skull to the lower left of ship rock? :P

It's more evident on the higher resolution picture

Just a matter of time before Hoagland and the other woo woos latch on to it.

itty bitty martians...

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Looks like a lemur... huge eye sockets.

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Then there's the three-toed footprint on top of White Boat itself.

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The "negative"-looking pictures are usually those taken through a filter that admits a narrow band of light in the near infrared. The strange darkening near the top of a rock is then an indication that the bare rock is much darker in this infrared light than the reddish dust that covers the base. If you were to look at the rock with your own eyes you wouldn't see that; more likely it would just look grayer at the top, as the approximate-true-color images indicate.