Paul Witte wrote:
Ok, so the redder pictures that are being released were taken at other wavelengths?
Not to confuse things, but the quick answer to your question would be "not necessarily". When they use different wavelengths that changes the appearance. But there are also a number of other variables that will change how an image looks. One of my jobs at the late, great Hansen Planetarium was to copy prints and slides. What a chore it was to get the colors right. I had a large color chart that I shot a picture of at the start and end of each roll of film. Try as I might, I rarely got it perfect, but after a few years of doing it I could get it close enough that most folks would not notice the difference unless they compared the copy to the original. Getting back to digital, one of those variables (which they've mentioned a few times during the news conferences) is the monitor on which the images are viewed. I have three monitors on my desk and images look different on each one. Another thing that changes the look are the eyes doing the looking. That's to say different people see the same colors differently. And then there's how the guy putting the images together does his thing. Images from Mars come down in black and white (no color cameras on the lander) and it's up to the individual "coloring" the images to get it right.
I wish NASA would include that information in the caption somewhere, maybe they have and I missed it. Some times they do, especially when false colors have been added to bring out detail. But sometime they don't.
I think the general public would probably more interested in how it looks in the visual spectrum, do you know if any of those are online anywhere? By that do you mean how it would look to the human eye? If so, as I mentioned before, it's up to the image technicians to get it as close to the real thing as they can.
Patrick