Stand beside Curiosity at dawn, and you wouldn't see a red planet or a blue one. You'd see murky light-tan cliffs and almost no colour in the shadows. That makes NASA's new blue Mars panorama a bit of a trick, though not the kind you might suspect.

Curiosity captured the scene on August 11 around 8:30 a.m. local Mars time. Its Mastcam took six images, which were stitched together after being sent to Earth. Unlike most Mastcam images, this one skipped the usual white balancing.

NASA called that "an artistic choice" that preserves the early........

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