Cool Moon view from sol 45

What would I ever do without forums? Kudos to Fredk from unmannedspaceflight.com for spotting this real beaut of an image from the Curiosity's colour cameras showing the evening sky on sol 45 and, if you look closely, the ghostly image of the Martian moon Phobos!

Crescent Phobos in the evening Martian sky (NASA/JPL/MSSS)

A scene usually depicted in science fiction books, I never thought I would ever see such a view! Below is a cropped up view stretched to the limit to show the moon more clearly.

Crescent Phobos cropped (NASA/JPL/MSSS)

Beautiful, huh? Really makes Mars look more Earth like albeit this is a much tinnier moon compared to ours. This image was taken with the 100mm focal lenght camera aboard Curiosity. The speckles in the image are artefacts due to the JPEG compression format used for the images transmitted back to Earth. The compression is good for less memory hungry images but bad due to the artefacts involved. It is for that reason that we can't tell for sure if the apparent glow above the crescent in the image is infact a real 'Mars shine' i.e. light reflected from Mars illuminating the dark side of the moon or not. We'll probably hear more about this tomorrow at the press conference. Stay tuned!