Dawn on Mars

While visiting the unmannedspaceflight forum yesterday (where you can find me as 'Doc') a photo from sol 44 image sets was shown that I think is important not just for it's obvious beauty but also because of how much it can teach us about living under the Martian sky.

Sol 44 navigation images looking eastwards stitched into a mosaic (NASA/JPL/mosaic by me)

The images were taken at around 5:30am local Gale time when the rover was still besides Jake Matijevic. Now the images shows a pretty exquisite view of light from the dawning Sun shining over Mount Sharp's flank, illuminating the scene around the rover with Glenelg seen in the background centre. You can also see the distant walls of Gale crater towards the left side which have a lighter shade than the mountain flanks because of the dust particles suspended in the air. So like the smog in some of Earth's biggest cities or the fog in some regions, this naturally affects the visibility of distant features.

Now a question comes up; how high up was the sun when this picture was taken? According to the ever useful Mars24 clock program (if you don't have it, I highly recommend you download it here, it's free and it shows all the times on Mars with a Terran clock). It may not have been very high up according to what the clock tells us:

MSL landing site lies just to the right of centre in this map. At the time on sol 44, Curiosity was right on the day-night boundary (NASA Goddard)

So why do we see so much light in the east where the sun is supposedly dawning? We are simply seeing light that is being scattered by the dust towards the rover's location. The sun is still below the horizon and what we're seeing is a sky glow effect. The scattering of the light can also explain why we don't see well defined shadows in the foreground because the direction of incoming light is quite diffuse i.e. it's coming form all possible angles, washing out any darkness in the area.

But leaving the science aside, the scene looks pretty serene and beautiful despite knowing that it's a pretty harsh environment. It stirs up feelings of surreal stillness not unlike the stillness of the morning air in the country side which force you to pause, observe and reflect upon irrelevant matters of existence. Nice!