{"id":12057,"date":"2012-11-04T12:17:10","date_gmt":"2012-11-04T17:17:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=12057"},"modified":"2012-11-04T12:17:10","modified_gmt":"2012-11-04T17:17:10","slug":"wipe-your-wheels-before-you-come-in-youll-get-sand-all-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2012\/11\/wipe-your-wheels-before-you-come-in-youll-get-sand-all-over\/","title":{"rendered":"“Wipe Your Wheels Before You Come In — You’ll Get Sand All Over!”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Whoa: now\u00a0that<\/em> just might be (as Bad Astronomy<\/em> blogger Dr. Phil Plait calls it<\/a>) “the single greatest vacation picture ever taken.”\u00a0The setting: somewhere in Gale Crater, on the surface of Mars. The subject: the Mars Curiosity rover… in a self-portrait. My first thought: the rover must have set up a camera on a tripod, and backed up a bit before triggering the shutter remotely. (Hey, if an engineering team can plan and execute\u00a0a landing like this one<\/a>, such a shot would seem to be small potatoes.) But no: the camera which took this photo is actually mounted on a mast arm which can be held out away from the rover’s body and aimed in any old direction — including back at itself.<\/p>\n

So where is the mast arm in the photo? It’s there, all right: 55 times. That’s the number of separate images combined into one final shot; the mast has simply been cropped or otherwise edited out of the images wherever it appeared.<\/p>\n

(A blogger at the Planetary Society<\/a> also notes that if you view the full-sized image, you can see reflections of the mast arm camera in a couple of spots — essentially making this one of those classic “this is me, taking a photo of a camera taking a photo of me” gimmick shots.)<\/p>\n

You can view or download a larger version of the photo here (1280 x 1780, 599KB) here<\/a>, or the full-sized monster (5463 x 7595, 7.7MB) here<\/a>. Either of those will allow you to see much more detail in small areas.<\/p>\n

People, people: how cool\u00a0is it to be alive at a time when we can see such stuff?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whoa: now\u00a0that just might be (as Bad Astronomy blogger Dr. Phil Plait calls it) “the single greatest vacation picture ever taken.”\u00a0The setting: somewhere in Gale Crater, on the surface of Mars. The subject: the Mars Curiosity rover… in a self-portrait. My first thought: the rover must have set up a camera on a tripod, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[94,95,250,17],"tags":[2390,3093,3152],"class_list":{"0":"post-12057","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-02_in-the-news","7":"category-science-medicine","8":"category-art","9":"category-04_technology","10":"tag-astronomy","11":"tag-bad-astronomy","12":"tag-mars-curiosity","13":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-38t","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12057"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12065,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12057\/revisions\/12065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}