The Big Picture: Mars

Nothing much to say today, so I decided to rummage around in the box of rainy-day post ideas. Here's one that I put in there waaaay back on the day before yesterday. It's from Alan Taylor's breathtaking Boston Globe photojournalism series The Big Picture, and was originally posted there on November 6 (while I was attending the Sideshow Gathering - and I still have to complete my posts on that!) This was found on the Livejournal of Chuck Anziulewicz, a native of Northeastern Pennsylvania who lives elsewhere but is linked through NEPA Blogs. Check out these astonishing Martian landscapes:

Martian landscapes - The Big Picture - Boston.com

Since 2006, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been orbiting Mars, currently circling approximately 300 km (187 mi) above the Martian surface. On board the MRO is HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, which has been photographing the planet for several years now at resolutions as fine as mere inches per pixel. Collected here is a group of images from HiRISE over the past few years, in either false color or grayscale, showing intricate details of landscapes both familiar and alien, from the surface of our neighboring planet, Mars. I invite you to take your time looking through these, imagining the settings - very cold, dry and distant, yet real.

MARS! A whole other world! One that you can actually explore for yourself!

As the good Doctor said,

How lucky we are to live in this time
The first moment in human history
When we are in fact visiting other worlds