THIS is spectacular.

The famous rover that NASA has deployed named Curiosity has taken some amazing footage of an unusual sunset on Mars.  2015 has been an incredible year for space fans and of the red planet in particular.  Not only have they found new evidence that Mars once had a significant atmosphere that got peeled by solar winds, they also found data showing it still has some version of one.  This had produced an incredible visual:

“The colors come from the fact that the very fine dust is the right size so that blue light penetrates the atmosphere slightly more efficiently,” Curiosity science team member Mark Lemmon, of Texas A&M University, said in a statement.

“When the blue light scatters off the dust, it stays closer to the direction of the sun than light of other colors does,” Lemmon added. “The rest of the sky is yellow to orange, as yellow and red light scatter all over the sky instead of being absorbed or staying close to the sun.”

This is a single pic of that blue tinge with more footage in the video

This is a pic of what a Martian sunrise would look like

Here is the actual clip that NASA produced and a brief description:

The panoramic camera movie combines exposures taken through different camera filters and accelerates about 17 minutes of sunset into a 30-second simulation. This clip is the longest sunset movie from Mars ever

Ok, so in a related topic have you heard the hoopla about “colonizing” Mars?  Do you think this is possible and is Elon Musk right in that it is a worthy endeavor?

Feel free to comment with your ideas.

thanks to space.com for the great info

thanks to NASA for the pic