NASA makes billion-pixel Mars panorama out of photos captured by Curiosity

Sure, they're mostly just pictures of sand and rocks, but we still have to thank the Curiosity rover for beaming back images of landscapes we'll never walk on. To give you a panoramic view of a Mars area called "Rocknest" with Mount Sharp visible on the horizon, NASA stitched together almost 900 exposure shots into a single 1.3-billion-pixel image. The photos were taken over the course of more than a month (from October 5th to November 16th last year) at different times of the day, so you can observe variations in illumination and thickness of dust in the atmosphere throughout the panorama. Head over to the source to access the whole interactive mosaic replete with pan and zoom controls, and if you're lucky, you might even see a rock the rover's laser zapped in the past.

[Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS]

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Via: Wired

Source: NASA