my name is mwd

If you trawl websites dedicated to providing desktop background pictures, you’ll find a lot of pretty renderings of science fiction scenes. However, this week, None just upped them all by producing this image from Mars:

It’s an impact crater that appeared some time in the last two years on the Mars surface, showing up between successive passes. The crater is 30 metres across, and debris spread out as far as 15 kilometres. The above image, which now graces my laptop’s desktop, is a composite of a large mono image and a small area RGB image produced by the HiRISE team at the University of Arizona. Wonderfully striking, and an example of fact trumping fiction for visual drama.

The HiRISE guys did make some desktops, but only of close ups of the crater; I much prefer the overview picture they put together, so I made some variations at different resolutions incase others want them: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, and 1600×1200.