Because Mars.
Yep. They can do this now. A panning 360-degree panorama. Of Mars.
Go full screen, and use your mouse to look around. And if your mouse has a wheel, you can also zoom in and out!
Mars Panorama – Curiosity rover: Martian solar day 1451
Oh, look, here’s another!
Mars Panorama – Curiosity rover
They actually have a whole bunch of these over at 360pano.eu. (They allow you to post them for non-commercial purposes.)
I love seeing Mars as an actual place, and the pannable panoramas do give you that sense of being there.
But, want to see my favorite section the panorama?  It’s this:
Selfie!
Here we’re looking down at the ground, and you can see parts of the rover, and its shadow on the Martian sand. And its very own name-tag.  On Mars.
That’s a thing that human beings made, that is now sitting right there on a planet that is not Earth.
We made it, we sent it there, it got there, it’s doing its job.   So lovely.
More later — I’ve got ton’s o’ chores to do in the next two days.  Still catching up from fighting-snakes mode.
