How to find NASA Perseverance’s images to edit for yourself

With the recent landing of Perseverance on the 18th and the first-of-its-kind video release on the 22nd, we are getting access to interplanetary imagery rivaled only by the Juno mission and its JunoCam. The website for the Perseverance rover will be the home for all the pictures, videos, and sounds taken by the rover for the public to view.

Image Breakdown

There are 2 picture sections on the site: Images and Raw Images. The Images section will contain all the NASA-created and edited content such as graphics and edited Perseverance pictures. The Raw Images section contains exactly what the name entails, raw images. You will find that most of these pictures are in black and white while some others may be in color but have a strange hue to them. This is to be expected as little to no editing should have been applied.

As of writing this, there are currently 4,796 total images in the Raw Images section. That’s a lot to go through. You may notice that there are some very small pictures along with normal-sized pictures. That is because they also put the thumbnail pictures they get from the rover up on the site too.

Thumbnail pictures are the low-resolution copies that they get from the rover first before getting the much larger normal resolution files downlinked. You can filter out these thumbnail images using the filters in the sidebar if you want to focus on the normal resolution images instead.

With these raw images, you can create your own edits of Perseverance pictures. I use Adobe Photoshop 2021 to create my edits but you can also create edits in GIMP, a free photoshop alternative. You will need to use the black and white frames that are individual color bands (Red, Green, and Blue) to construct a full-color image.

Here are some of the edits I have made using Photoshop, Astronomy Tools Action Set (For constructing the RGB image and contrast enhancement), and Topaz Labs GigaPixel AI (for AI image up-scaling)

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