STUDIES BY MARTIN KEITEL

THE FACE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS What you see here, is a picture showing the face and the other mountains surrounding it. This image is processed from on of the original Viking photos by removing isolated pixels (see the face image later) with the median filter and then adjusting contrast and brightness. Only when you look at the big picture, you can see how different the face is from other formations around it (some of which also look artificial, like pyramids): 1. The "texture" of the face is smooth compared to the roughness and sharpness of the mountains 2. The face is an isolated detail in the middle of a lot of smooth plain surface. 3. The shape of the face is a regular rounded rectangle, while all the other formations are irregular or have polygonal edges If the face is a natural formation, why are they NO even remotely similar shapes in the surrounding landscape? Let's see the face more closely... GEOMETRY OF THE FACE I found a site in the net, that had original raw viking photos to download (about 500-600 kilobytes GIF files). I downloaded the one with the best shot of the face and processed it. As mentioned above, with the overall view I used the median filter (Adobe Photoshop) to remove the isolated pixels. But because the median filter also blurs the image slightly, I wanted to use another method with the face to get best possible image quality. 1. I cut the face out of the picture. This picture shows the formation without any processing, even scaling. 2. I removed the isolated bright pixels one by one, by copying a colour next to the pixels. 3. I scaled the image 100 % (400 % in terms of area) and adjusted contrast, brightness and sharpness. The result is an image that looks very much like others you may have seen. For me it was important that I could get this image from the original material, so that I can be convinced nothing is added or removed from the picture. What is most striking to me is the straight lines: in the outside and inside of the helmet part (also in the forehead), the mouth hole and the line going from between the eyes, through the nose to the peak of the chin. Also the neat arc in top of the helmet is interesting. Just based on this image you might think the "crack" in the forehead is just a random artifact, but it's present also in the other picture that shows the face in slightly different lighting. continue to next page