Oh wow—fell down a rabbit hole and wound up on Mars

It was only days ago we had Mars Curiosity sending us the one selfie to rule them all.
And now we have this total 360 panorama of her first drill site.

Here's an interesting size comparison of the terrestrial planets in our Solar System

Here's an interesting comparison of the terrestrial planets in our Solar System—left to right Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars to scale. Looking at the numbers, their radii are: Mercury 2439 km, Venus 6051 km, Earth 6371 km, Mars 3389 km.

I grabbed this from the first video lecture of Dr Bruce Betts' Introduction to Astronomy course. Bruce is from California State University and he's also the guy who does the "What's Up?" sections of the Planetary Society's Planetary Radio podcasts (also available via iTunes).

You can watch all his lectures as they become available each week, or if you can't wait, there's a link on that page and you can dive right into last year's lectures...

Back to the planets with a few more numbers: check out the overall density of each planet.

Is this the most awesome selfie ever? And it's on Mars...

This latest photograph from Mars Curiosity really does set the benchmark. Gigapan have done one of their incredible photo merges to form this huge single image that lets you pan around and zoom in almost to the point of seeing individual dirt grains.

The screen grab on this page is only a fraction of the shot. You have to click through to GigaPan, go full screen, then immerse yourself! Look down to the left too, where you can see the red dirt scuffed off the surface, leaving a grey patch near a white gypsum vein. That's where Curiosity performed its first drill test just today.

The only thing you can't see in this image is the robotic arm itself, because that's where the camera is mounted. In mosaicing the photos, they have to choose one frame with the arm right out of the way down low, or else there'd be bits of arm scattered across the shot. Of course there'll be some crazies out there who can't wrap their heads around this, and will be claiming the photo was taken by a person, meaning that it's all staged somewhere here on Earth. Let them have there delusions...but it's just like taking a 360-degree panorama shot with your smartphone with neither your phone or your feet showing. If you have an iThing, try it for yourself with the free app 360 Pano.

This is the official JPL animation showing how the photos were compiled: