"Has NASA's MESSENGER gone color blind?"
Apparently "Mercury's unseen side now seen!" is only available in
those colors of gray. After all this time, and of our hard earned
loot spent, I'm actually rather disappointed in NASA's MESSENGER. Are
we ever going to see the full visible spectrum scope and photographic
color depth and contrast worth of our digital images, or merely as
limited as to whatever gray pixels they see fit to share in B&W and of
such limited DR to boot?

Of course there's always the full scope of UV and IR spectrums of
colors outside of the human eye response, that as such could also be
easily made available, especially if given the same eyecandy hype as
accomplished on behalf of most everything else that's out of our
reach.

Perhaps it's just little old me deductively wondering, as to exactly
why our spendy MESSENGER color imaging potential is being
intentionally turned off or excluded from public review, and as to why
their CCD dynamic range remains as so dismal.
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/sciencePhotos/
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/...p?gallery_id=2
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/...108821596M.png
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/...108826105M.png
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/...26040M_45M.jpg

Thanks to our "no kid left behind" policy, as of prior to CCD camera
imaging perhaps all of 0.1% of Americans even understood what
photographic spectrum sensitivity and the associated DR(dynamic range)
of B&W or color film even meant. Since the advent of commercial/
consumer CCD cameras and the continued dumbing down of America, I'd
say that fewer than 0.0001% (that's one out of a million) of our
supposedly educated population of mostly snookered and thus easily
dumbfounded village idiots have so much as a freaking clue as to what
either factor of spectrum sensitivity or much less that of what DR
means. Of course this is perfectly good news for those of our cloak
and dagger 'Skull and Bones', as well as for all those faith-based
rusemasters within our NASA, and especially on behalf of those
unfiltered Apollo Kodak moments that somehow never managed to get any
such blue saturated images of our naked and physically dark moon like
those recently accomplished by China and Japan with their quality
bandpass filtered optics.

Here's that other one of Venus by way of MESSENGER that's about as
wussy/pastel worth of color and pathetic DR as you can possibly get,
and still having just enough to call it color, especially weird since
most cell phone cameras would have taken a better color image.
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/...=2&image_id=88
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/...ch%20Image.jpg

Remember the Earth flyby, whereas our easily color spectrum corrected
as a dark-golden-brown moon was intentionally kept out of frame and
otherwise as either too physically dark or perhaps it was invisible
due to their intentionally limited DR usage, however the pastel color
and/or dynamic range limited image of Earth looked quite nifty.
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/the_miss...galapagos.html
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/the_miss...lapagos_lg.jpg
http://www.jhuapl.edu/newscenter/pre...005/050826.asp

Is this lack of color imaging all because of Mercury being so gush
darn moon like, with similar crater upon crater morphed terrain and of
a low amount of albedo, but otherwise offering such a deposited and
local mineral rich geology, and subsequently colorful surface as
capably imaged by those spendy mirror optics, whereas at least one of
which having an extremely good set of narrow bandpass filters and/or
spectrum cutoff filters, and with each of those CCD imagers having
such terrific DR(dynamic range of at the very least 4X film and that's
not even including the extra +/- skew of their CCD DR).

So, where exactly are those true colors of Mercury?
Perhaps MESSENGER's color imaging potential can be fixed while on the
fly, prior to eventually returning for their full orbital mission of
mapping Mercury gets under way.

. - Brad Guth