Mars Hale Crater Looking West

[tholden]

Has anybody other than myself taken the trouble to check out the claims about the Hale Crater on Mars??

A typical Youtube video describes the problem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcR7VX-F ... re=related

On the ESA (European Space Agency) website in the section on recent Mars images:

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/index.html

You can search for 'Hale Crater Looking West'

and the instructions the youtube video gives to navigate to page 21 won't work since they're basically dated and other images have been added since the video was made. You arrive at this page:

http://www.esa.int/esa-mmg/mmg.pl?b=b&k ... =y&start=7

and this hi-res image:

http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/mar ... ater_H.jpg

Typical crater image more or less, except to a trained eye it looks like somebody has monkeyed with brightness and contrast a bit too much and some of the ripples in the surface appear a bit too regular even in the version of the image they make available to the public. A growing number of the people following this stuff don't trust ESA or NASA any more and have been checking some of these images out. The doubters tried simply adjusting brightness down and contrast up, and zooming a couple of times. In fact I've done the same thing to convince myself of it (corel photo paint, Gimp, PhotoShop or whatever); this is a bit of what turns up:





Now, I don't have any sort of alcohol or chemical problems nor any of the kinds of medical problems which cause people to see things that aren't there, and to me those images very definitely contain several tall and totally rectangular structures.

It strikes me as hard to picture anybody wanting to build a city inside a crater UNLESS whatever was going on was getting towards the end of anybody being able to live on the planet and then you might could picture building or collecting stuff for whatever purpose inside a crater for protection.

[tholden]

I left out one item, i.e. you want to convert the ESA to grey-scale and then play with brightness, zoom, and contrast.

[StevenJay]

All I see is a lot of pixelation - something to be expected in an extreme zoom of any digital image. Since pixels are square, it shouldn't be surprising that the artifacts that they create also appear square or rectangular. Ever notice how such "anomalous" structures are pretty much always sharply squared-off rather than having any smoothly curved lines? *Wow, it MUST be a gridwork of city streets and large buildings!*

This particular "hi-rez" image of Hale Crater has a ground resolution of about 40 meters/pixel. Personally, I'd consider 1 meter per pixel to be closer to "high resolution."

[tholden]

All I see is a lot of pixelation - ...."

Maybe I'm reading something the wrong way. Are you claiming all you see is pixels in this image??

[StevenJay]

Maybe I'm reading something the wrong way. Are you claiming all you see is pixels in this image??

Well, without knowing exactly where this enlargement is located in the crater, and at what magnification it's being manipulated/displayed. . . yep, that's pretty much what I'm claiming.

[tholden]

Maybe I'm reading something the wrong way. Are you claiming all you see is pixels in this image??

Well, without knowing exactly where this enlargement is located in the crater, and at what magnification it's being manipulated/displayed. . . yep, that's pretty much what I'm claiming.

Simple problem with semantics... The interesting stuff in the ESA image is in the bottom third x left two thirds part of the image. The two picture I included are zoomed three or four times using Gimp, I don't know what magnification that works out to but it should not be hard to duplicate. Other than that all I've done, again, is zoom, adjust brightness and contrast, and convert to grey scale.

[kalensar]

I'm happy to say that I've done the same type of photo work on this picture. Thanks for posting.

For comparisons from earth, take a satellite photo of a city and then grey-scale it. Looks eerily similar if done with the entire photo.

[StevenJay]

When I Googled Hale Crater, it appears as though everybody and his dog has has taken a stab at high-altitude digital image analysis and siting it as "proof" of martian civilization.

Here's the original image. The crater is just under 140km in diameter.


And my manipulated version. The large inset is about a 200% zoom.


It's been my experience that if you take just about any satellite image with a 40 meter/pixel ground resolution and perform the same proceedures (boosting the contrast by about 80% and reducing the brightness by about 60%, which is pretty extreme), you'll find pretty much the same sort of JPEG ARTIFACTS every single time (which is what I'm still seeing). Besides, to interpret it as the gridwork of some metropolitan center. . . on a basically airless planet is, IMO, an Earth city-based assumption that simply doesn't make any sense. On top of that, NONE of those perfectly parallel lines show any PERSPECTIVE whatsoever; something one would expect to see considering the angle of view and the distances being represented (meaning the entire lower left quadrant of the image).

[tholden]

I'm happy to say that I've done the same type of photo work on this picture. Thanks for posting.

For comparisons from earth, take a satellite photo of a city and then grey-scale it. Looks eerily similar if done with the entire photo.

My pleasure. Obviously with something like this one I'm posting for the benefit of those who might get something out of it and not for those who refuse to.

[Influx]

Humans suffer something called patternicity, that is seeing something that is not there.

Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise. Why the brain believes something is real when it is not.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... l-patterns

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/fe ... -rock/4706



I am sure if one saw this picture on mars, or any other planet, it would be claimed to have on archaeological origin.

[tholden]

Humans suffer something called patternicity, that is seeing something that is not there.

Then again, refusing to see something which IS there is called "denial"...



Nature simply does not do rows of large rectangular objects.

[Influx]

Then again, refusing to see something which IS there is called "denial"...

Hey I would love for there to be on extinct civilization on mars, or even a live one, but, meh, digital artifacts. At 40 meters per pixel stuff like this should be plainly obvious.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

[Shrike]

I downloaded the original picture. And opened it with GIMP .
without magnification or contrast or brightness adjustments you can see already rectangular shapes.
But this is because of jpeg transformation between color difference to adjacent pixels. You see jpeg sucks at color coding and magnification. I don;t think the original photo was in jpeg but esa turned in to jpeg for web down load.
I would like to see the original tiff or hiress algorithm it was actually made in.
If ESA actual made the images in jpeg i am very disappointing in them as the scientific value would be almost zero and it just ain't anything more than a pretty picture.

tiff's or other would be 10Meg or 100Meg or even more in file size so they convert it into jpeg for web use witch is at least 10 times smaller. in the converting process information gets lost. How else can the image file size be smaller.

Im sorry to say but magnifying and contrast/brightness adjustments on jpeg give false information as the jpeg is already false information due to information loss and poor jpeg algorithms.

I would actually love to see evidence for civilization or lost cities on mars.

Nature simply does not do rows of large rectangular objects.

No nature doesn't but jpeg transformations do

[StevenJay]

Then again, refusing to see something which IS there is called "denial"...

And refusing to see any other explanation, no matter how logical, is called bias.

Nature simply does not do rows of large rectangular objects.

You're right. It doesn't. But digital image compression DOES!

In addition to the points I raised above, here is another one I forgot to include: Why is this metropolitan center that you're convinced is there exactly the same color as the surrounding terrain? Even without any magnification or other image manipulation tricks, a large crisply outlined urban construct that covers dozens, if not hundreds, of square miles should be clearly visible in the original image. But, amazingly, it isn't - even with extreme magnification. In other words, unless the image is converted to gray scale and heavily manipulated, none of the anomalous signs of "civilization" you and others claim to exist are discernable.

So far, you have chosen to dismiss everything I've said as being nothing more than my refusal to see the world through your eyes. That sounds suspiciously like a typical mainstream cosmologist's retort to anything that challenges the concensus belief system he/she has chosen to adhear to and become heavily invested in. At that point, the only thing left to say is, "Believe what you will."

[tholden]

You're right. It doesn't. But digital image compression DOES!

Jpeg compression involves several compression techniques including cosine transforms so that any artifacts which the technique produces are spread out evenly over the image, i.e. you won't see four or five tall rectangular structures in one place on the image and then other kinds of non-naturally-occurring things in other parts as you do in the image I posted; that's what makes the detection and analysis of steganography such an impossible task.