Emily Lakdawalla • Mar 09, 2011
Pretty picture: Viking 1 across Mars
Image magician Daniel Macháček has been turning his energies to Viking Orbiter views of Mars lately, with some stunning results, like the one below. I'm not sure how he makes images that look so sharp and clean and with such rich color out of the Viking Orbiter data.
![Viking 1 view of Mars' southern hemisphere from Ascraeus Mons to the pole](https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/web/assets/pictures/_2400x5760_crop_center-center_82_line/mars_v01_color_strip_machacek_f204s51_62an.jpg 2400w, https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/web/assets/pictures/_1200x2880_crop_center-center_82_line/mars_v01_color_strip_machacek_f204s51_62an.jpg 1200w, https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/web/assets/pictures/_768x1843_crop_center-center_60_line/mars_v01_color_strip_machacek_f204s51_62an.jpg 768w, https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/web/assets/pictures/_576x1382_crop_center-center_60_line/mars_v01_color_strip_machacek_f204s51_62an.jpg 576w)
If you're curious to see the data that he started with, well, I was too, so here it is. You can actually see a surprising (surprising to me anyway) amount of albedo variation between the violet- and red-filter images, so the subtlety of the color that Daniel managed to achieve is no longer surprising -- but it's still a fantastic job cleaning up the data. It just goes to show how many beautiful views of Mars are just waiting to be released from the Viking Orbiter archives.
![Original data for Daniel Macháček's Viking 1 view of Mars](https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/web/assets/pictures/_2400x1578_crop_center-center_82_line/mars_vo1_machacek_f204s51_62an_originaldata.jpg 2400w, https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/web/assets/pictures/_1200x789_crop_center-center_82_line/mars_vo1_machacek_f204s51_62an_originaldata.jpg 1200w, https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/web/assets/pictures/_768x505_crop_center-center_60_line/mars_vo1_machacek_f204s51_62an_originaldata.jpg 768w, https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/web/assets/pictures/_576x378_crop_center-center_60_line/mars_vo1_machacek_f204s51_62an_originaldata.jpg 576w)
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