Cydonia Quest

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Image Enhancements

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Surface Features on the Fort

Some surface patterning on the Fort has been catching my eye on the higher ground above the "Deck". The area of interest is circled in green on the reduced context image on the left. In order to enhance these patterns I've magnified part of the Fort's surface by a factor of seven, then lowered the brightness but increased the contrast in the picture.

Electronic images can be magnified without the picture completely degenerating into a mess of blotchy pixels because the better image enhancement software includes a feature variously known as anti-aliasing, interpolation or up-sampling. This just means that they use probability theory to make an estimate of what an image would have looked like if it had been taken at a higher resolution. There is a very good explanation of this technique by Professor Stanley McDaniel which can be read by clicking this "stargate" µµµ.

The results of these efforts are shown in the image below. As this is an extreme magnification, it is best to sit well back from your computer monitor to get the best viewing effect. It can be seen that some parts of the Fort's surface appear to consist of dimpled, house sized, square'ish blocks. If we adopt Hoagland's arcology hypothesis then the impression given is that we are observing the heavily eroded remains of a box like structural engineering technique. The resolution of the original MGS image from which this enhancement has been made was a low 15 feet. It would be interesting to see what the surface of the Fort would look like at a much higher resolution with a low Sun angle to pick out small variations in surface relief. There are other interesting looking features on the Fort and Face where new higher resolution imaging would be helpful, but where NASA and Dr.Malin's scepticism won't oblige us.

Cydonia Quest has already considered whether the Fort might be a super building of the type proposed in Richard Hoagland's arcology model. This can be read by clicking here µµµ.

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