@sharponlooker
Maybe it shows Phobos behind the thin Martian atmosphere?

@65dBnoise #SpaceTeamWork & find where the probe was at the time? 😉

https://archives.esac.esa.int/psa/ftp/MARS-EXPRESS/HRSC/MEX-M-HRSC-3-RDR-V3.0/DATA/4698/H4698_0006_SR2.IMG

@sharponlooker
The problem with #ESA is that they seem not to care about how the end user is going to use their data. #NASA instead cares much about providing the data in formats that's easy to use right away with popular technologies.

I'm trying to find how I can open the IMG files, which I presume are raw images in a Microsoft created format, on a Linux machine. There are so many lossless image formats to pick from, why use a format that doesn't have even an image header in the file?

@65dBnoise I open the file on a text editor and the header is there, doesn't it work for you?

@65dBnoise it's been a while since I did this, but I think I used a img2png program by Björn Jónsson, but maybe even a home-brewn variant that cleaned up dead pixels on the same run

@sharponlooker
Thanks. That's for windows though. I've been windows free for more than 18 years now 😃

@65dBnoise wise approach 😉

my variant was done against dotnet core, which should be portable to Linux. One day (famous last words) I'll have it on github or something 🙂

@sharponlooker
How do you view these files?

@65dBnoise text editor if I want to look at the header, convert to png if I want to see the image. Color space is quite wide, so you have to mix with the levels in gimp to see anything.

Ask @andrealuck what he uses, he just posted other files from the dataset rather quickly, so I bet he has other better tools

@sharponlooker @andrealuck
I just asked him. He posted a screenshot with GIMP, so either his GIMP directly reads the file, or he's using some plugin to do that.
Re: the header has a wealth of info about the image, orbital parameters, footprint on Mars (I presume) etc. It also says its a PDS file. I may have been half wrong blaming ESA for the format 🙂, or completely wrong about it altogether 😬

@65dBnoise @sharponlooker I first open img files with Fits Liberator version 3 then after processing I save in tiff for Gimp, I’ll give you the link of the software as soon as I can