The “tree stump” on Mars was in the news this month, and it is indeed an interesting formation, of which there are countless examples in the Curiosity image gallery.  I don’t mind such fanciful descriptions, since it does bring attention to these images, and in fact my attention has flagged badly in the last few years, after having followed them assiduously in the early days.

I still have my PTGui panorama maker, and my “curiosity”, so I followed up on this one.

Since “You’re in the shop” I’ll share a minor glitch which vexed me greatly just yesterday, but today’s a new day and all is well.

I composed the following panorama which contains the frame from the Mast Camera that was publicized as showing a “tree stump”

Of course, it’s missing a piece! This does show that the panorama is composed of 8 separate ( overlapping ) images. But it is certainly a detraction. I spent maybe an hour trying to figure out what was wrong before I went ahead and let PTGui figure it out.

If you “click to enlarge”, then click the “+” to magnify, you will see the whole thing in the resolution of the “stump” panel that was in the news.

Well, then, today I found the following in the Raw image gallery:

So there we have it. ( This is an excerpt with the header note pasted on. ) So of course it was a simple matter to patch in and form the full panorama:

Much better! But what about this “stump” ? I looked for other images, and found the following from sol 1648, whereas this was sol 1647:

This is a panorama of 5 images from the mast cam, in color this time, as they usually are. Curiosity had moved “overnight” and you can see the large “fin” , which is to the right of the “stump” in both images, but this time the view of the “stump” shows lateral extension, indicating that the sol 1647 image was “edge on”.

Never fear, at center bottom we have a cylindrical post with some kind of runic marking! The poetry of Mars is never dead.