Gigapixel Mars

This is pretty nifty: Some folks at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory took 900 high-res pictures from the Curiosity rover and created a pan-and-scan mosaic of Mars that hasâget thisâ1.3 billion pixels!

Oddly, I canât put it here (though there is a scaled-down version on the JPL Photojournal site), but I made a couple of screen shots you can see. Itâs fun to scan around and then zoom in on something that looks interesting. A few tourist attractions are listed, too, like a series of holes zapped into the ground by the powerful laser on the rover, used to determine the chemical composition of the samples. Other spots listed include a rock shaped like a bird (kinda), distant Mt. Sharp (Curiosityâs eventual goal), and the original rover landing site.

Itâs a fun way to spend a little time, tooling around the red planet. Actually, as I was fooling with the mosaic, a weird sensation swept over me momentarily; the whole dang region is covered in red dust (which is mostly iron oxide, or rust), and you really get a sense of that when you poke around. Just for a second, it felt somewhat like being there.

Also, the rock formations look familiar, if youâve ever spent any time in a dry stream bed. The arrangement of the rocks, the flattened outcroppings ⦠it reminds me of a day I spent in a dry stream bed outside of Roswell, N.M., shooting some scenes for Bad Universe.

Funny how much a small, red, and distant planet with only 1 percent of our air can suddenly remind me of home. For a sufficiently broad definition of âhome,â I suppose. Still, if you live in Arizona, Mars might look a lot like what you see out your window some days â¦