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The night sky from Mars Rover Curiosity's Mastcam

The night sky from Mars Rover Curiosity's Mastcam
The night sky from Mars Rover Curiosity's Mastcam The night sky as imaged by Mars Rover Curiosity's Mastcam M-100 camera on the evening of sol 397. The dark blur below center is M31, at magnitude 4.5; the darkest streak is a 4.5 magnitude star; the other dark streaks and the bright streaks are stars down to magnitude 7--this image is the difference of two M-100 images to remove detector artifacts, hence the positive and negative stars. Comet Siding Spring could be almost 10,000 times brighter than M31, but would be spread over 100,000 times the size of that smudge without concentrated activity near the nucleus. NASA