Spirit's heat shield.

[snabald]

I noticed in the sol 69 pan-cam images there were shots of spirit's heat shield sitting on the rim of Bonneville. The pictures were taken through filters 4, 5, and 6. I combined them to get a "color" image and noticed that the heat shield looked unmistakably blue, just like all the "blue" rocks everyone has been talking about. So here is my question, does anyone know what color the heat shield actually is?

Would this actually help in calibrating the color in other pictures?

[ToSeek]

Looks more yellow to me.

[snabald]

Ok, cool, so here is the picture made by combining the raw images:



It appears it's highly reflective in the "blue" image. I can't seem to get it to look yellow no matter how much adjusting I do. Maybe I'm just no good with PhotoShop. #-o

[CrzyWeazl]

I somehow do not think that the anti-corrosion paint would survive entry In any event, metals change color when exposed to high heat, which is what I suspect happened.

[majic]

this is typical for the effect you get when you just try to manually combine RAW images - the color will be off, way way way off. There are a number of threads on this forum where people try to defend the standpoint that they can somehow manually combine RAW files and get accurate color (I'm not saying you are btw!) ...and my opinion is simply that we cant - the blue of the heatshield looks very very blue indeed. It's a safe bet to say its gray with only hints of blue, e.g. a metal.