Bruce Murray was an early advocate for the inclusion of cameras on planetary spacecraft. As a tribute to him, I thought I'd take a look at a few of the images from the early Mariner missions to Mars. Like many other gnarly old data sets, the Mariner images are being revisited by the community of amateur -- and professional -- space image processors; a lot of work has been done on Mariner data by amateurs Ted Stryk and Piotr Masek as well as planetary cartographer Phil Stooke.

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post about pre-Space-Age photographs of Mars. Here is some of the best photographic data available on Mars before the Mariners got there, a page from Earl C. Slipher's Mars: The Photographic Story.