We would like to make a correction on our last blog update from Wednesday; Peter Wellmann had in fact submitted three versions of Mars' North Polar Regions. The corrected versions are all below. To read more about how Peter did his processing, check out the footnotes at the bottom of the page (after the jump..). Enjoy! And thanks, Peter for these impressive results. -- Daniel

The first picture shows almost all of the North Pole, surrounded in a dense cloudy haze. Craters Korolev and Alba Mons have been located easily .

Peter wrote:

 “This very interesting VMC-material shows the almost complete North Polar Region and its surrounding area covered with clouds and haze. Identifying the surface details is impossible. Only Korolev crater and Alba Mons could be found. The stunning details below Alba Mons could be high reaching and dense clouds with their shadows. These gigantic clouds extend roughly over 150km. Sometimes sand storms cover the whole planet with dust, but never before have I seen Mars with such a large cloudy and hazy area. The surface structure is clearly visible only in small areas around Alba Mons, even the North Polar Cap is not detected safely, even though the pole is situated right on the terminator. The clouds show an interesting spiral structure, probably induced by coriolis force acting on air streaming out of a high pressure area on the northern hemisphere of a left spinning planet. Although there is little sharp detail in the raw-material I decided to give it a try.”

The second edit shows a similar situation as the first picture, the only difference being that they are on different sides of the hemisphere. This picture shows the complete polar region and the craters Acidalia Planitia, Lyot and Lomonosov could be clearly detected. The entire pole is covered with nicely structured clouds and haze.

Peter wrote:

“This very interesting VMC-picture should be seen as supplement to my previous submitted image 2010/11/13. It shows the part of the polar region not visible on the 2010/11/13 image. Almost the entire North Pole and surrounding area is covered with nicely structured clouds and haze. Identifying surface details is not easily accomplished. Only Acidalia Planitia is partly free of clouds, and Lomonosov crater can be easily detected. On a second look the large crater Lyot is seen full size inside a semicircle of clouds. Some other structures are easily detected by comparing with the Celestia image, but we do not know their names. Surface structure is clearly visible only in small areas, even the north polar cap is not detected safely, although the pole is situated right below the terminator. The clouds show an interesting spiral structure, in a large stripe to the left very fine structure is visible. Although there is little sharp detail in the raw-material I decided to give it a try.”

The final image is of the complete North Pole covered in a nicely structured haze. The two pictures of Mars were taken about 4 days apart. Some landmarks were identified under the cloud haze.

Peter wrote:

“This picture combines two VMC-operations; the first took place on 2010/11/23, the second only four days later on 2010/11/27. Both operations meet a time with strong cloud and haze-activity on the northern part of Mars. By comparing these images, my idea was to show the rapid change in cloud-structure. Due to the hidden surface it is not easy to identify landmarks, but I was able to locate some prominent craters for better orientation comparing the two images.
 
Processing colour from the original raw-frames by using the supplied flat-field, the atmospheric structures come out gray/white and not yellow/brown, so I assume they mainly are clouds and haze, not sandstorms. It is amazing how different these structures look, in some areas they look rather smooth, and in other areas they show very fine details. There also seems to be a difference between dawn and dusk, just compare the left (dusk) and right (dawn) terminator in the region of the “horn”. Also it seems that surface conditions affect cloud structure above. Processing these pictures was not easy and time consuming, but looking at the result I think time was not wasted. I do like this picture.”

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Regular VMC contributor Mike Malaska has submitted another oustanding image edit for the Mars Webcam blog, shown above. His work is based on an image of the North Pole of Mars from a VMC observation on the 30th September. The polar cap of the planet can just be seen in the middle of this image, with low sunlight glinting off the patches of snow and ice surrounding it. As Earth heads into Northern hemisphere autumn, Mars is also in Northern autumn at the moment and this view captures beautifully the impression of low sunlight in the Northern parts of Mars, with ice and snow signalling the coming winter.

Mike wrote the following to us about his work on this image:

The main reason I initially got excited about this image was (1) North Pole of Mars and (2) taken at apoapsis (maximum height above Mars, about 10,000 km) of the Mars Express orbit. I was hoping for several pictures with very little change that could be used to make a 'super-resolution' image. Unfortunately, there was a 1-pixel-per-image rotation counter-clockwise (in this orientation) of the surface that messed up my plans.

This image was created by making an average of several images: Nos. 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, and 16, then Gaussian blurring this by 1 pixel to make a smooth color background. Next, Image No. 12 was used as a luminosity layer. It was also used as a HiPass layer to enhance subtle details. Finally it was blended with some of the original Image No. 12. Contrast enhancement and rotation (to put the North Pole at the top) and cropping gave the final image.

As always, excellent work Mike — and thank you for the submission and for showing us the beauty of Mars.

We'd love to see what other visitors can make of VMC images, too — just check out the Help us with VMC link at right to get started! -- Thomas

We have an excellent submission to share with you as today's Friday treat: a poster project entitled 'Haze in Valles Marineris by Peter Wellmann'.

Peter has created a beautiful enhanced image and a poster highlighting atmospheric haze high above Valles Marineris; these are based on four VMC images acquired on 9 October 2008 (proving the point that archived data can have value years after it was collected) when Mars Express was orbiting about 7500 km above the surface.

Peter's first image shows a beautiful, long wispy streak of haze running over the entire Valles Marineris surface system - at more than 4000 km long, 200 km wide and 7 km deep, the Valles Marineris rift system is the largest-known canyon in the Solar System (and is much larger than North America's puny Grand Canyon). His poster includes many additional details of surface geography and clouds.

We were really impressed with the analysis that Peter did prior to starting image enhancement work - which was a challenge due to the considerable amount of movement by Mars Express during the 3.5-minute slot in which the four raw images were acquired. This work follows on Peter's earlier submission, North polar cap - posters by Peter Wellmann, posted on 18 August.

Thanks, Peter, for an excellent submission! (Click on 'Full story' to access more details and the full-size versions of the images). -- Daniel Scuka

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We are delighted today to bring you a detailed post on the excellent Mars Webcam project submitted by the Astronomy Group at the Humboldt Gymnasium (high school) in Vaterstetten, near Munich, Germany. The project began in March 2010, when the school's Astronomy Group, led by teacher Markus Schmidtner, set forth the following project goal:

The astronomy group of the grammar school in Vaterstetten, Germany, was happy to get the opportunity to adopt a VMC-Operation. This operation took place on 23rd of March 21 from 0:28 a.m. to 1:08 a.m. At this moment the satellite was situated near the apocenter of the orbit, the highest altitude above the planet. The aim was to process the raw - images supplied by ESA and then compare the images taken with the Visual-Monitoring-Camera (VMC) with our own telescope images and to generate a stereo image with the data of the VMC.

Our post today includes several of the excellent images processed and developed by the school team as well as links to their full PDF & web report.

"Speaking on behalf of the entire Mars Express Flight Control Team, I am very impressed with the work done by the teachers and students at the Humboldt Gymnasium. Their work, analysis and results prove the value both educational and scientific of even 'low-tech' images delivered from deep space. Congratulations on a project well done and we wish you continued success in your studies."

-- ESA's Michel Denis, Mars Express Spacecraft Operations Manager, ESA/ESOC

All of us here at the Mars Webcam blog were tremendously impressed with the work done by the students. The goal was to analyse VMC images and determine how these compare in resolution to images obtained from the ground and, interestingly, from the joint ESA-NASA Hubble Space Telescope.

The student team was able to demonstrate that the VMC camera, viewing Mars from 10 000 km, provides images having similar resolution to those provided by the Hubble telescope viewing Mars at 88 million km. They also created an excellent stereo image of Mars.

Congratulations and thanks for an excellent report!

"When Mars Express leaves apocenter and approaches the Planet, resolution of VMC images will increase so much that even the powerful Hubble Telescope has no chance - this shows drastically the importance of missions like Mars Express. If you want to find out, you must go there..."

-- Humboldt Gymnasium VMC Project Report

Click on 'Full story' to access more details and links. -- Daniel

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Peter Wellmann, from Germany, has sent in two excellent Mars poster compositions using the fabulous 8 August polar cap image set.

His first poster comprises a cleverly processed main image (based on two of the raw VMC images) and several smaller images to provide location and orientation information. Peter has also included a detailed identification and description of craters, possible dust clouds and the day-night terminator. The second poster shows the original processed image in a larger size.

Peter wrote:

"On the way out to apocenter, Mars Express VMC shot this wonderful picture of the South Polar Cap emerging from the dark terminator above. Composed of two RAW-frames it shows fine colour shades and a lot of small craters not readily seen in the single frames. The lower left might show some dust, clouds or haze, the bottom right corner shows bright patches in the region of Moreux crater we suggest to be clouds."

Access Peter's full report and full-size versions of his images under 'Full story below'. Thanks, Peter, for an excellent submission! -- Daniel

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