Mars has blue-hued sand dunes

Here is a link to the closest to real color they have

BTW, color enhanced means they boosted the color saturation to improve contrast.

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catspice2

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But if it is “ehanced” would it be blue to the naked eye?

Many of these space pictures (especially Hubble photos) are very beautiful, but heavily edited (basically assigning colors from visible spectrum to ultraviolot, infrared, xray etc)

Neat, i was hoping that the dunes were actually blue and seems like thats the case. But yeah, the article’s statement is worded poorly as to what “enhanced” means.

Yes, I hate it that NASA releases images in “enhanced” colors without a boldfaced disclaimer “this is not the color your eyes see”!
The HiRISE page is here: https://www.uahirise.org/ESP_053406_2295 with various versions of the image.
This site gives information on what “enhanced” color means: https://www.uahirise.org/pdf/color-products.pdf
“For the Extras products, each color band is individually stretched to maximize contrast, so the colors are enhanced differently for each image based on the color and brightness of each scene.”

My best guess is that it’s something you don’t see much of on water rich planets, kyanite an aluminosilicate which usually, in the presence of water, becomes one of the hydrous aluminosilicates which are white. It forms as elongated, columnar crystals which would make it different enough from your average silicate to give you different patterns from the wind. But all that is just a guess.

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My shitty layman guess would be the generic “Must be some type of salt” answer :stuck_out_tongue: Which is usually the case with this space stuff.

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Looks like one of those little desktop Zen sand gardens, including the artistically arranged lines made with a miniature rake

Closer examination clearly shows that is not a dune, but used kitty litter.
So if you exam in the evidence objectively, the only conclusion you can come to is that cats are really martains. (Which explains a lot!)

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Wow, would have thought someone would have known…

Having a weird feeling of invisibility today.

If you’re fond of sand dunes…

…and the Moon looks like this…

image

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