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http://littlefish.com.au It's 21-Aug-09. Sky turns butterscotch to blue as sun sets behind a wall of haze. Eerily feels you're there yourself! Maybe the wind is howling - sound* effects! FullscreenHD+headphones! Thanks MER team! It felt amazing redoing my old first attempt move from small 12kb b&w jpegs. (*Google Southampton Uni's simulations of how things most likely sound on other planets). Sunset On Mars Spirit Rover Acknowledgments NASA + Sound Click: Original work by me gratefully using the following creative commons licence or NASA public licence materials: - http://nasa.gov/home/ http://soundclick.com/ Anyway the photos still make a great video. Great sunset. Dust storm. Spirit Rover was "dust storm" checking! Lack of sunshine is death for a solar powered rover! Curiosity Rover launch [Mars Science Laboratory] is coming soon. Opportunity Rover has amazing "survival skills" or I should say it's the smart team headed by Steve Squyres at NASA / JPL. Mars Rovers a great value planetary mission. Hopefully, Opportunity will overlap Curiosity mission as Curiosity landing on Mars is only about 7 months away. Old Notes: How exciting to see a sunset on another world the day after it has happened! The pics that make up this movie were taken by Spirit, one of the two NASA Mars Rovers, on the evening of 21st August 2009 from near a place called Home Plate in Gusev Crater. Real time frame for the start to end of the video is about 18 minutes. Spirit has been spending the last 5 years or so of its '90 day' (great value for money!!!) mission travelling around this crater. My friend Gaby - the ace film-maker - said I should post this! A sol is a Mars day and is about 24 1/2 Earth hours. To find Gusev go to Google Earth and click on the ringed planet (looks like Saturn) next to the right of the sun symbol on the top bar. Click the drop down arrow. Click Mars. Type Gusev into the search bar on the top left. Gusev is big - about 150 kms in diameter. It 's about 14 degrees S of the equator. Note the huge water course breaching the crater ramparts at about 5 o'clock and flowing away to the SE. It probably flowed at short intervals (geologically speaking) between about 3 to 4 billion years ago. Spirit is located pretty well dead centre. The background hills seen in the movie are not those of Gusev. They are the walls of a smaller range of hills inside of Gusev about 15-20kms away. The rocks in the bottom left foreground form the top of a hill near to Spirit The sky is very hazy due to the presence of regional dust storm - it is near mid summer and the dust storm season for Mars. Dust storms are very dangerous for these solar power rovers. Note how the sun disappears well before it hits the horizon. The movie was made from black and white jpegs, 16kb each, downloaded from the Exploratorium web site where NASA downloads data from the Mars Rovers pretty well immediately after they are received by the Deep Space Network. The colours will look different according to your monitor settings and other factors. I've really pushed things on this first cut which is a work in progress. I will be updating it when I've got a bit of spare time - like getting a more true 'real' colour bluish tinge to the sun/dust as the sun disappears. Steve Squyres/Jim Bell, of the Rover program, have pressed for real time release of info like this. Such a forward looking progressive policy is much appreciated. Thanks to them and thanks NASA. It was very exciting to see the sunset a day after it happened. Great to be able to add my little bit by processing the black and white stills into a colour movie. No doubt they will be doing a far better job than me when they have the time! For more go to NASA or this great site - unmannedspaceflight dot com Enjoy! Credits for pics; 1- NASA-JPL-Caltech featuring Spirit, Colette, Kim and Paolo 2- Martin Pauer-Wikimedia-NASA picturing Gusev Crater 3- NASA-JPL for the Spirit stills of the sunset All is...