Saturday’s front-page of the Arizona Daily Star featured a good article about HiRISE with a humorous photo of Chris S. shoulder surfing as Anjani P. worked.

This is of course a typical scene as these images are coming down. Someone will be “driving”, so to speak: browsing, “surfing”, zooming, panning, contrast stretching and more, using the amazing image processing tools that our partners at the USGS in Flagstaff have developed. And someone else (or two, or three, or a dozen) will be standing over their shoulders, watching and collaborating. Or in Chris’s case, probably making jokingly snide comments.

But it makes for a world of difference between what you, out there, the public, experience and what we experience. Bridging that gap is a challenge for our public outreach team as the mission continues. We’ve got the benefit of having the brightest minds in planetary geology offering live commentary and analysis using the finest tools and top-of-the-line workstations. The experience of seeing the image is very dynamic; jumping between resolutions, zooming in to dunes and boulders and rocky outcrops, “stretching” the image to pull out detail hidden in dark shadow or blended in on bright surfaces.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that while our excitement is evident from the posts here, communicating exactly why we’re excited is much more difficult. Unless you could be here shoulder surfing….