Is NASA doctoring photos from mars? This site shows compelling evidence! Opinions?

Question

http://www.goroadachi.com/etemenanki/mars-hiddencolors.htm

doesnt explain why the picture with the three astronauts in front of a blue sky, I saw that press confrence and they didn't mean to put that pic up on the screen. It was rushed off the movie screen as soon as the astronauts saw it on the slide!! Watch the press confrence and watch them freak out about him showing that pic behind them at a press confrence. I think that is the most compelling part.

Answer 1

They are not doctoring the colors. They are just having trouble adjusting the color balance of their cameras. It is not as easy as you might think. I had to try 10 times to get my passport photo to have the colors acceptable to the government. It might seem easy, just take a snapshot with a white background. So I had my daughter take a picture of me with a digital camera with a white wall behind me and printed it using a self service digital photo vending machine at the local market. The wall came out looking yellow. So I adjusted the colors with my computer and then printed it again, and the wall looked green. It was REALLY hard to get it white, like I knew the wall really was in my home. Since nobody has ever actually been to Mars to see it close up with their own eyes, nobody actually knows what color it really is. So they just do the best they can to adjust their colors. It isn't fake or doctoring, it is just not perfect.

Answer 2

No, I wouldn't say any photos had been "doctored." There are two perfectly reasonable explanations:

1. The color of Mars actually does change from day to day and month to month, depending on the lighting conditions and the weather. When there's lots of red dust blowing around, it appears redder. The dust intensity varies quite a bit.

2. These aren't regular cameras. Not all the cameras are sensitive to the same colors, or even visible colors at all. For example, some of the cameras see more into the infrared than the visible. What color is an infrared image supposed to be? The NASA folks have to convert from the colors the camera sees into the colors that people see, and how that's done depends on what you want. For example, the images might be adjusted to bring out the most contrast, or to make it easier to see certain features.

Usually when NASA does release an image that uses the same colors that a human sees, they mark it as "true color." If it's not marked as "true color," then you can assume that the colors are not what they appear--usually because the image is easier to see with a different choice of color.

Answer 3

There is a difference between doctoring a photo (changing information on it to achieve a purpose) and adjusting colour.

Colour adjustment has always been a problem, even in the days of chemical negatives. Although our brains adjust to the change in the nature of lighting, film does not.

That is why photographers (good ones, at least) always checked for the "colour-temperature" balance of the film. If you took a picture of a scene inside the house, lit by the good-old tungsten lights (a.k.a., ordinary light bulbs) with normal, daylight film, everything appeared yellowish.

That is exactly how the tungsten light looks. However, our brains adjust to the light colour when we move indoors, and we never see grandpa's birthday cake as yellow; we see it as white. So photographers have to adjust the colour of the pictures to make the cake look white, DESPITE the fact that the true colour, under tungsten light, is yellow (and green under some fluorescent lights).

Because that is how the brain sees the cake.

On Earth, the combination of the Sun's true colour (slightly yellowish) combined with the light of the sky (very blue), gives the mix of light that we call "daylight white", for which most films are balanced.

On Mars, the yellowish sun (dimmer) and the atmosphere give a slightly yellowish light (with a bit of a red tinge).

However, if we were moved to Mars, our brain would adjust (at least partly) and correct for the yellowish light. If a photographer came along and photographed a wedding, the bride would reject the pictures showing her dress as yellow-pinkish. As far as she is concerned, it is a white dress.

So the photographer will correct the picture by removing a bit of the orange tint, to make things look ever so likely bluer, so that the colours represent what the brain would actually see. This may make things that are really white appear bluer than they should.

As for logos disappearing, you have to note that it is a B&W photo, most probably taken through a filter. Filters in B&W will either enhance contrast or decrease it.

For example, if you take a picture of a red object on a white background, with a red filter, the result will be a blank background (as far as the film is concerned, the background and the object are exactly the same color: red). The object disappears.

The "evidence" is far from compelling.

Answer 4

Nope. Basically the sensors aren't the same as the human eye or consumer digital cameras. So you have to use filters and computers to "reconstruct" the colors. NASA does a pretty good job, others mucking about with the data - not so much.

http://www.atsnn.com/marscolors.html

A simplified version is here:

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/hoagland/mars_colors.html

Also see this, from the scientists who seem to have made the camera;

http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_instrument/projects_1.html

Just another wild conspiracy theory. Here's an entertaining version:

http://www.ufovideo.net/MARS.htm