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> Though he used a brown/red color scheme, the thought that Mars was red did not enter his mind. [...] It is uncanny how close his color scheme is to the actual

by pvorb 4y ago

> Though he used a brown/red color scheme, the thought that Mars was red did not enter his mind. [...] It is uncanny how close his color scheme is to the actual colors of Mars. It’s as if they came right out of current images of the planet. I'm sceptical. If you look at Mars from Earth, you can see it's red even without a telescope.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wheelerof4te 4y ago
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that the science guy in the 70's knew which color Mars was.
abhorrence 4y ago
The article isn’t saying that he didn’t know it was red, but rather that he wasn’t actively thinking about trying to match the color. Obviously there’s a question of conscious vs subconscious thought, but the claim is at least that he chose red/brown because it would represent grayscale well.
m463 4y ago
Coming from a blue planet there might be some color bias. We should really observe from the moon which seems to have a neutral color.
- zxcvbn4038 4y ago
  This is where I start to give credit to a lot of Mars conspiracies. I know that the cameras on the Viking probes were tested and calibrated on Earth to give accurate colors, the probes themselves had color calibration chips on their hulls that the cameras could use for testing and recalibration, yet for some reason the sky and ground on mars was always shown as red hued (like in the 80s Total Recall movie), or maybe the sky was a little yellowish - until it wasn’t! Suddenly one day Mars had a blue sky and most of the rocks are grey, and only the soil is red. Not any real explanation I’ve ever heard, just oh by the way the sky on Mars is blue, in other news…
  - idlewords 4y ago
    The color of the Martian sky depends heavily on how much dust is in the air, but it's generally orange-ish, while a dust-free sky would probably be black! People have scienced the hell out of this. For example see: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2006JE002687 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200... The question of what it would look like to human observers is another matter. A lot of photos from Mars are color adjusted to try to capture what we'd see if we went in person.

by pvorb 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

wheelerof4te 4y ago

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that the science guy in the 70's knew which color Mars was.

abhorrence 4y ago

The article isn’t saying that he didn’t know it was red, but rather that he wasn’t actively thinking about trying to match the color. Obviously there’s a question of conscious vs subconscious thought, but the claim is at least that he chose red/brown because it would represent grayscale well.

m463 4y ago

Coming from a blue planet there might be some color bias. We should really observe from the moon which seems to have a neutral color.

zxcvbn4038 4y ago
This is where I start to give credit to a lot of Mars conspiracies. I know that the cameras on the Viking probes were tested and calibrated on Earth to give accurate colors, the probes themselves had color calibration chips on their hulls that the cameras could use for testing and recalibration, yet for some reason the sky and ground on mars was always shown as red hued (like in the 80s Total Recall movie), or maybe the sky was a little yellowish - until it wasn’t! Suddenly one day Mars had a blue sky and most of the rocks are grey, and only the soil is red. Not any real explanation I’ve ever heard, just oh by the way the sky on Mars is blue, in other news…
- idlewords 4y ago
  The color of the Martian sky depends heavily on how much dust is in the air, but it's generally orange-ish, while a dust-free sky would probably be black! People have scienced the hell out of this. For example see: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2006JE002687 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200... The question of what it would look like to human observers is another matter. A lot of photos from Mars are color adjusted to try to capture what we'd see if we went in person.