First-time contributor Rick Hollar, from Bakersfield, California, USA, has sent us two beautiful interpretations of one of the images from the recent low-altitude VMC image sets - where Mars Express orbited down across the end of the Red Planet's great valley, Valles Marineris, and past the Tharsis Montes chain of volcanoes.

To get such stunning detail out of the original VMC image, Rick used a technique called 'flat-fielding' - which maps the marks and irregularities on the camera itself and subtracts them from the digital image to output a 'cleaned' version; this technique can be applied to improve all VMC images.

Hit "Full story" to see Rick's two interpretations of this image, his description of what he did and a comparison with the original VMC image, as delivered from Mars. Thanks for the submission Rick! --Thomas

Here's what Rick wrote to us about processing these images:

These were both processed from the same image with slightly different processing. I was able to use many images in this set to create a pretty good flat field for removing the artifacts. These processed images used the original VMC image: 10-014_18.01.47_VMC_Img_No_31.png. The flat field was created, and this VMC image was flat-fielded using ImageJ. The saturation was then set to +50 and RGB Channels stretched separately in Photoshop.

Here, then, are the three images: the original and then the two versions by Rick.

Original Image

Processed Image 1

Processed Image 2