PHABULOUS!

Here’s an excerpt of a sol 351 Curiosity Mastcam image catching Phobos ( at bottom ) passing by Deimos high overhead in the wee hours, local time, 2013-08-01 08:44:11 UTC as labelled in the Raw Image Gallery. You can clearly see the features of Phobos, which make it very reminiscent of the Death Star.

I can recreate this event with my Starry Night software by setting my viewing coordinates to the Bradbury landing site on Mars. However, it doesn’t seem to quite match up in detail, and I can’t even come close to identifying the background stars. So that’s a bit of a mystery to me.

I haven’t seen any publicity for this yet on the Mars Science Laboratory web site, but I guess they’ll get around to it. There was publicity for a series of Navcam photos from Sol 317 made into a movie, but that was at low resolution.

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