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v3ritas1989 t1_it20mal wrote

Why are the pictures always so weirdly cut and stitched together? Is it using more than one camera with different aspect ratios or do they somehow stitch together a time series after moving, having to cut out parts of other picuters? And why are they always tilted?

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Pluto_and_Charon OP t1_it36mkb wrote

They're tilted because Curiosity is actually sitting on a pretty steep incline right now, it's climbing up a mountain after all, so the horizon is slanted/sloped.

They're cut and stitched together because the camera's field of view is not wide enough to capture the scene in one photo, instead it creates *mosaics* of photos produced by stitching together dozens of photos taken seconds apart. This is necessary to get such amazingly high resolution panoramas. There IS a wide angle camera with a big enough FOV to capture it all on one go, but the result is quite unspectacular!

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