images

Sunrise over a martian canyon. Artwork

by

Walter B. Myers/Novapix

Reference

a-mar99-10006

Date

2009-02-12

This is how a martian sunrise might look from the bottom of a deep canyon. The Sun is surrounded by a bluish halo due to dust in the martian atmosphere.
During the martian day, this dust absorbs the blue light from the Sun, resulting in an overall salmon colored sky, but it also scatters some of the blue light into the area immediately around the Sun. The blue color only becomes apparent near sunrise and sunset, when the light has to pass through the most amount of dust.
The canyon is representative of the land forms found in the Olympica Fossae region, located in northern Tharsis, south of the Alba Patera volcano.