Happy Valentine’s Day and Happy Lunar New Year, Spirit! Here are some of our imaginings about how you look as a station!

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Silence at Troy - Spirit's Next Million Years from Emmanuel Gaffard

There are six secrets hidden in this image. Emmanuel says: “Some are Mars exploration related. Kind of. Can you find them?” (I’ve found one so far … he sent me the answers, but I haven’t opened that file yet.) If you want the answers, comment below and I’ll e-mail them to you.

Also of note – as this is pixel-art, the display, zoom, and rendering are important. See below* for extensive detail, or visit PixelJoint.com to increase your exposure to the medium. The original size of Silence at Troy is available here.

Spirit on Mars - Gary Kezele

This entry is from Gary Kezele, accomplished artist and astronomy-visualizer. Bear with us while we get a better scan of this image, but for now you can see a decent version of Gary’s submission! Please click to see it in more detail.

Both these entries show amazing attention to detail – and you can tell they looked closely at the photos of Spirit’s location.

Hobby Entries

From @MamaJoules come two model entries – one from each son. I love them both, and bet that it was a lot of fun to build rovers out of Legos and then try to position them just right in the “sand.” :)

Spirit - by Kerm, 8

The camera mast is great, there are lots of fun details, and the flag is a nice touch too!

Spirit - by Little Brother, 4

Once again, the camera mast is in evidence, and the rover is just like Spirit: it has six wheels (I wonder if all of them work on this model).

Thanks to everyone who submitted – I’ll be sending you all some fun NASA postcards. :) I’ll also pass these along to as much of the Spirit team as I can.

More

These were not submissions, and you’ve seen them before, but I had to include them in this post because I thought you’d enjoy them.

Spirit Embedded at Troy Credit: Keith Enevoldsen

Image from Stuart Atkinson

Go see more of Stuart’s Mars Art.

*Pixel Art

Emmanuel has sent these details about viewing pixel art, which I found fascinating.

Pixel-art makes for small images and files. They should ideally be viewed at 200%, 300% max. You should be able to just see the pixels without them being overwhelming.
Displaying pieces at 100% makes them look very small, and the pixels are lost on good monitors.

Using the browser zoom is not an option! All current browsers use ‘bilinear filtering’ for zooming images (and most image viewing software too), the result is horribly blurry on pixel-art (you might have noticed this if you browsed the Pixeljoint gallery and used the zoom function. However, from Firefox 3.6, websites can opt for an old-fashioned unfiltered zoom function. This is not something the user can do, it’s only a website-side option. So if you visited Pixeljoint using Fx 3.6, you didn’t notice any problem.

You should note, I did not do anything website-side to enable this function in Firefox. All his images are displayed exactly at the resolution I got from him though. Clicking the main image takes you to his 300% zoom version.

Want More?

The Mars Exploration Program at JPL

Thanks all! Let’s do it again sometime. Thanks to the NASA Solar System Ambassadors Program for the support.

~ A l i c e !

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