One of our blog readers asked about the wallpapers we post on our website for some of our released images. If you haven’t seen these, they’re linked over on the lower right of pages like this. Many different sizes are available, from 800×600 all the way up to 2560×1600 (for lucky people with ginormous monitors), so you can choose the right size for your screen resolution.

Our masterful web master creates these wallpapers for each of our weekly captioned releases (these are the images we release each week with some commentary written by the science team). He picks out an interesting area from each image and produces custom cutouts in different sizes. We provide these extra files because we think the images are so beautiful, everyone should have them on their desktop. Because they’re all done by hand, though, we unfortunately don’t have the resources to make these special products for every single image. For example, most of the 1,642 images we released in our big December PDS release don’t have wallpapers. However, you can make your own, and here’s how!

I make my own wallpapers all the time, so I can see the images that I planned. You can make your own, too – it’s really easy. They’re basically just screenshots, zoomed in on a part of the image at high resolution. If you’ve never done that before, here are instructions for one way to do it.

Let’s say you’re enamored with this image of Phlegra Montes (PSP_009308_2295), which was part of our PDS release, but it doesn’t have any wallpapers. There are a few ways to do this. The one we recommend (and the one I personally use) is the IAS Viewer. We’ve talked about this tool quite a few times on this blog, but here’s a short step-by-step in case you’re new to this tool:

1. On the image page, click on JP2 QUICKLOOK (IAS Viewer), and a menu will drop down showing the available products.
2. Click on the product you want.
   • Personally, I like color, but that’s only in the middle of the observation. If you want to see the entire field of view, get the grayscale, which includes all of our red-filter CCDs. Map-projected products will have the image oriented so that North is up – I prefer this because then the shadows appear to my eyes to be in the “right” direction. In this example, I chose IRB color (map projected)
3. You’ll get a popup window asking you to verify the certificate – click Trust.
4. The IAS Viewer will open. Make this as big as you can fit on your screen. Make the image that opened as big as you can fit, too.
5. Zoom (magnifying glass with plus) and pan (scroll bars, hand tool, or Overview map at top left) until you like the view. Don’t forget to re-stretch!
   • The resolution is shown in the bottom of the viewer – 1×8 means it’s eight times reduced, 2x means it’s zoomed in to twice the full resolution, etc.
   • Make sure you zoom in to full-resolution (1×1) at least once, because it’s awesome!



6. Save the view to a JPG file (disk button). It might look something like the one to the right.
7. (optional) Open the JPG file in another application, such as Photoshop or GraphicConverter to do additional stretching or processing. For example, you might want to tweak the color or contrast to your particular taste.
8. Use that file as your wallpaper or screensaver, or both!

Caution: Doing this may lead you to spend WAY too much time looking at beautiful HiRISE images and making wallpaper! You’ll find that you can make many, many unique full-resolution wallpapers out of a single HiRISE image!

Thanks to the webmaster for help in writing this, as well as for all the outstanding wallpapers he’s already produced!