Well, I found this, which may be of interest to some peoples.
http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Mars_Expres...NCO7BTE_0.html
It shows the famous face from a rather different angle, literally.

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A snowflake is symmetrical too. Are you implying artificial symmetry?

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Olsen the moderator.

Proof of a NASA/ESA cover-up no doubt.


Thanks for that link.

I just love Mars. The facts of Mars are intriguing to me as the imaginary Mars is to the CTs.

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Olsen the moderator.

The uplifted base on which the "face" sits is only superficially symmetrical, in my opinion. The notion that the right side is "eroded" is rather presumptive, since there is no evidence of a previous outline that would have completed symmetry with the left side and lower curve. The high-order continuity of the lower left portion of the base indeed triggers the impression of symmetry. But to consider the right edge to have been earlier symmetrical and then eroded into asymmetry (with no evidence for either point) suggests the desired conclusion is probably driving the interpretation.

Indeed, the right side of the image shows evidence consistent with heavy landslides, which if anything extended the outline along the convoluted right and upper edges.

If you use a maximum-aspect bounding box method to infer an axis of symmetry (i.e., enclose the feature in the smallest bounding rectangle oriented with the largest ratio of length to width), signifcant features of the outline fail to line up, such as the discontinuity in the upper left with the suggestion of discontinuity in the upper right.

That has limited utility as the method can only work on certain classes of features; and the intuitive contour-from-shading translation may fail to account for coloration.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

For 3-d flythrough animations like that, I wish they would prominently mark the z-axis exaggeration factor. I couldn't find it on that page, but it looks to be considerable -- maybe 4x or more.

It's a pet peeve, along with publication of false-color imagery that doesn't disclose same.

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Relight the Firefly!

"It is quite clear that Occam's razor does not sharpen in your pyramid." (Nicolas)

"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." (Paul Simon)

This one in particular is an angry young lady. (Depending on your defintion of "young." But I don't think I'm middle-aged yet!)

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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!"

**EDIT** I hit response and didn't notice that there was another page!! I'm responding to the same post Gillian is referring to ...sorry for any inconvenience ... since I know that being distracted by my extremely important input is a detriment to society as a whole



Well...yes I do actually have an issue with anyone complaining about Gillianren...she has taught me more about grammar than my english teachers (well..I may be exaggerating a bit...but I admire Gillian alot! ...especially since I'm irritating her right now with : poor ; punctuation!! HA! )

Pete

***Dang I was too slow again !

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PJE

There's so much I don't know about astrophysics. I wish I had read that book by that wheelchair guy.

Personally, not a lady, not old (except in comparison to a year 9 schoolkid) nor angry. On the other hand, do get a bit p'd off at the lack of ability to understand or speak (or write) the basic language - if you couldn't be bothered paying attention while underpaid hard-working teachers attempted to educate you in how to communicate with your fellow man, why should we believe you bothered to pay attention when they tried to educate you in how to think, analyse or pontificate?

if you didn't bother to learn how to think, why should we believe you have anything to say that hasn't been said by those who did learn from those who went before & learned enough to pass on their inspiration to their fellow man? (Of course, only those who learned to read & understand the language within which said inspirations were communicated could actually comprehend said inspirations - which could be the reason for paying attention in class...)

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* Never doubt there is Truth; just doubt that you have it!

Hello to everyone, this is my first post. I'm sorry to bump an old thread but.....

I have an aquaintance who makes his living selling spiral copper tubes to "vitalise" water and (obviously) believes all sorts of rubbish. Now, I'm unable to convince him of the idiocy of his beliefs about water (he "knows" the water passing through his "vorticies" tastes different etc etc and he has even convinced a top London restaurant to install his "equipment) and not many people I know take him seriously on that subject, but, he is now, using the ESA Hale Crater images, getting people to take seriously the whole "Mars Civilisation" baloney.

The trouble is that no matter how many of the ESA 3D "in perspective" images I examine I am unable to find any with similar "compression artefacts". I have read through (most of) this thread and, although people have posted links to other pixellated photos, none look anything like the artefacts on the Hale image/s. If someone could find another image that contains the same effects I would be most grateful. (Of course, if the image was of somewhere on Earth that would be even better, but I suspect that the characteristic effects only occur due to the particular processes through which the ESA images have been subjected.) Surely there MUST be some if all the "in perspective" images were produced the same way? And if not, what is special about these?
Being reduced to repeating "it's just compression artefacts, stupid" is not very convincing.
Please help me in my small fight against the forces of darkness

Thank you in advance.

They are effects of both quantization and compression. They are very characteristic here. Whether they may have been duplicated elsewhere does not really matter if the identification in this case can be so certain.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Thank you, JayUtah, for taking the time to reply.

Let me make it clear that I do NOT for one second believe the image/s of Hale are anything other than what you say they are, "quantization and compression". I say that to reassure you that I am not fraudulently posing as a non-believer only to later reveal myself as a CT by refusing to accept the explanations (as I see that others do in other threads) thereby wasting your time

Unfortunately, logic will not convince my aquaintance and his growing band of believers, only evidence - and even then I'm doubtful .
If the effects are "very characteristic" then I presume there must be other examples of similar effects and, if not, why?

I'm sure any of you can "out-logic" me, but I would have thought that "whether they may have been duplicated elsewhere" DOES matter. If it is a repeated technical process wouldn't other examples occur? Wouldn't it be strange if none did?

PS @ DonnieB - the z axis exaggeration is 4, according to something I got from following a link (now lost) from the ESA site. "Vertical relief here is exaggerated by a factor of 4. The HRSC is a modified version of team leader Gerhard Neukum's original camera, which fell into the Pacific Ocean in November 1996 with Russia's Mars 96 probe." And I agree, very annoying that the exaggeration is not marked.

There is a pretty good compression artifact article on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_artifact

that should give you a base-line of understanding of how they come about and what they look like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG

That's specifically for JPEGs though MPEGs show quite the same thing.

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tut...imagetypes.htm

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---"Why do things have to suck so bad?" a friend once asked me.
"Because space is a vacuum and that's a lot of suck." I replied.
(Actual quote)---

Wow! 2 replies already! Thanks.

However I'm rather afraid I will exhaust your goodwill and patience by saying that, while I believe the whole collection of weird little shapes that the image/s of Hale show (the connected circles, completely differently sized "patches" etc etc) are the result of processing and are not real, I still do not understand why I cannot find similar effects in any of the other ESA images.

I noticed that the Hale image/s in question are labelled "in perspective" so I looked at many other (but not all, I admit) of the other similarily labelled images, all processed the same way by Neukum's team, but I can't find anything other than the kind of pixellation to be found in any jpeg image if you zoom in too much. These artefacts are completely different (or seem so to my uneducated eyes).

Maybe I'm just being thick, and I'm certainly very ignorant about jpegs, compression etc but I can't understand why the Hale image/s have these extra artefacts. Especially as they often seem to be larger in scale than many small details which seem to be imaged correctly and are checkable against the black and white un-modelled images (although this might be down to my ignorance on the technicalities and purely a red-herring).

Basically, I just want to see ONE other image with the same artefacts and I'll be happy. I'll be able to show it and say "there, see? happens all the time".

Here's a link to the HRSC project and how the camera works - if that helps at all.
http://berlinadmin.dlr.de/Missions/e...ameraeng.shtml

I'm sure any of you can "out-logic" me, but I would have thought that "whether they may have been duplicated elsewhere" DOES matter.

Compression and quantization artifacts are ubiquitous in digital imaging. Almost every digital image contains them to one degree or another. And in most digital images, such artifacts can be amplified. Are they as noticeable elsewhere in 3D texture-mapped synthesized images? I don't know.

Saying they are "characteristic" means they can be identified easily regardless of context. A fingerprint looks like a fingerprint whether it's on a glass tabletop or on a leather seat cover.

I sympathize with your desire to satisfy your friends, but don't be duped into accepting their proposed standard of proof as reasonable. Saying that it can't be a quantization artifact until some other similar example is shown is pure distraction. To imaging experts there is no question what the artifacts are.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

As for the water-coil business, consider this from Penn & Teller's BS! program:
Fred

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"For shame, gentlemen, pack your evidence a little better against another time."
-- John Dryden, "The Vindication of The Duke of Guise" 1684

He's a very annoying aquaintance, not a "friend", and his friends are not my friends either.
I do have some taste.

Ok then, it's still early days for my request for similar effects to be answered but if I can't find, or no one can show me, another similar example, why is that? Do these effects take many forms, different each time? That seems unlikely to me - presumably the same procedures and processes carried out by the same team on the same equipment would produce the same results, or am I missing something here? Or is there something unique about this case?

Clarification please.

To which images do you, djinn, refer to as the disputed ones. Links? And, could you list a few of the ESA images, with links, in which you have failed to find similar features? (The former is way more important than the latter.)

I think it's the Hale crater stuff cited way above above, but I'd be guessing. I haven't seen a pointer to a/the specific cited image that we are now discussing. (Nor have I carefully read this topic since my early contribution.)

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The images I am referring to are # 2 & 5 and can be found here -
http://www.esa.int/esa-mmg/mmg.pl?to...rater&subm2=GO

They are, of course, both made from the same model (which is why I have been saying "image/s").

As you can see, both are titled "in perspective", so I searched on that phrase and downloaded and examined quite a number before I gave up. I tried mainly to look at images which resembled the one/s of Hale Crater ie, of craters with flattish floors. I'm afraid I can't remember which in particular.

http://www.esa.int/esa-mmg/mmg.pl?to...ctive&subm2=GO

Thanks.

That looks familiar. Did you see article in previous topic Can you hear me Major Tom....? Read it all.

I think a true-believer was possibly swayed there. Maybe. The thread sure locked its wheels and stopped its roll.

There, I presented a less-processed version of the image, or similar, that still shows the artifacting in a simpler form, more obviously JPEG -- or some form of DCT.

Raw, or closer to raw, images are worth a look when the heavily processed, stomped on, draped, smoothed, obscured images are touted as showing alien artifacts. You get a chance to see if the artifacts might actually be human, caused by our primitive tools.

Humans defeat aliens once again. Yay, humans.

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Since I read this thread so long ago and am loathe to go back through it again, I'm not really sure what artifacts your buddy is referring to. But when you apply a 2d texture to a 3d map, artifacts are inevitable. Pixels get stretched when applied to the side of a mountain.

Here's a screen of a 3d DEM of Iwo Jima with texture applied to it. And
here's where I got the texture. Actually it was google earth but eh. Mt. Suribachi got pixelated while the rest if the island looks pretty good since it's flat. And Suribachi is nowhere near the height of the ESA stuff. Add in the size of the area covered, which I'm sure is much larger than the area covered by Iwo Jima and there's all kinds of potential artifact possibilities.

Of course this is only STMR2 which is not very detailed but it's the best us civilians can getof the area. More detail in the 3d model creates even more problem areas.

I hope this at least gives you an idea about how easy artifacts can show up when you drop a 2d image on a 3d model. At least I had an excuse to show off my Iwo model.

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You're a coward and a liar and a thOOF - Bart Sibrel

Ok everyone who responded, thanks. (But stop callling him my "buddy" I despise the guy)
Sorry I didn't see the Major Tom thread earlier, or I wouldn't have bumped this thread, asking the same question (why are the Hale image artefacts different from any of the other ESA compression artefacts?).
I see it was suggested that transmission problems and/or over-proccessing are the most likely causes, and, of course, that is a gadzilllion times more likely than that the artfacts are "real".
I don't really understand what has happened enough to explain it to or convince "my buddy", or anyone else, but I accept it.
I never thought the artefacts were real, I just didn't (and still don't really) understand why the Hale image/s have different artefacts from other images (or any I've been shown anyway), but I won't waste anyone's time any further.
I just hate being told something and to accept it. My instinct is to say "show me, prove it".
Once again, thanks for your time, and if nothing else, I have found a very interesting site.

Oh, I thought I'd read that he was a friend. This place has such a huge volume of traffic that I tend to skip details in my daily attempt to get 'caught up' each day. This is not to be confused with speed reading. I can't do that, I just make believe I can.

You aren't wasting our time. We're here anyway and I for one love trying to solve a mystery. It's just that most of the mysteries presented here are a bit above my paygrade level of space knowledge. I do know something about making 3d terrain though. So this is one of the few topics I can get my teeth in to.

The problem is I'm not really sure what you're referring too. In the #2 and 5 images, I see the afore mentioned streaking caused by slapping a 2d image on a 3d map and some fuzzy spots. The fuzzy spots get lumped in with the blocky pixels and compression artifacts because, in my opinion, that's what they are. There are some places that appear to be sand filled depressions and, for some reason, the applied overhead shot is knackered. My guess is a poor attempt to stretch a texture in one direction to fit the 3d data. Either that or it's just too small. Maybe they will redo it with a better texture some day. Though it's my impression that ESA just says 'Here, take this. We have given you this. Worship us.' In this case the 2d image would probably be more valuable. The 3d work is just for ooo ahhh effect.

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You're a coward and a liar and a thOOF - Bart Sibrel

The transmissions were digital, so that is not likely a source of problems. The images were clearly processed, to hell and back, compressed, draped, combined for color, smoothed for viewing, twisted, turned, stretched. By now, the original raw images are probably available via the Planetary Data System (PDS) [for instance: PDS: Map Projected HRSC data from the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Mars Express] so a scholar or interested hobbyist, and especially a claimant of fantastic conclusions, should be using the raw data, unprocessed.

Anyone, any buddy or anybody, who claims that some mass-market beauty image from ESA, or other source, provides evidence of astounding alien intelligence, must demonstrate the provenance and pedigree of the image -- where it was taken, when, by what, how, who held or manipulated the image since it was captured, when, how, and all the rest that actually allows the evidence to speak clearly.

If they don't bring out the earliest and most reliable images right away to prove their contention then you can be sure what they claim is incredibly ill-founded and unconvincing, and that they are either ignorant or deceptive, or both.

I don't understand the need to find images that have gone through exactly the same steps to produce exactly the same types of artifacts. Beauty shots are not mass-produced by robots through precise steps. They are hand-crafted. I wouldn't expect two to look similar at the level you seem to desire. I think that search is futile, even if automated to look at every space image released ever.

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Hello Gary,

being a liberal European on the payroll of the European-Vorldwide-Interspace-Liberation conspirational organisation (i.e. EVIL) I give up. You got me and I declare here for once and all and ever and time and again: there are faces on Mars but no one will ever see them. We won't let that happen!

Extracelestial

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Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth. - Dennis Overbye

<psst..Extracelestial>

MarsRevealer was banned a long time ago

Pete

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PJE

There's so much I don't know about astrophysics. I wish I had read that book by that wheelchair guy.

I really don't understand how can these guys see faces and other structures in blurred and oversampled pictures. I only see rocks and no special terrain features. It seems to be another mars channels sindrome.

Doc.. Is it serious?


Well, Mr. Farnsworth, it's almost as bad as Cows.

My sentiment entirely then I read this thread Todaytomorrow UFO Thread where the OP takes it to a whole new level

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But you're sure the astronauts are lying; you just don't seem to know what they're lying about: Jayutah


I are Learnding.

What I really can't understand is the direct connection between Mars woo-woo crowd, and utterly horrid website design.

Hey, guys, I'm going to be a jerk and jump in here without having read the whole thread. I'm trying to debunk what I think might be an old one:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/galle...P1994R0M1.HTML

That this image from the navigation camera on Sol 115 for Opportunity shows a "piece of wood" on Mars. If anybody's got a minute can you point me to a link on this? I've been looking for an hour but I'm hardly anywhere up to speed on the topic. Thanks!

Jay