[dr_lew]

Wow. It's worse than I thought. I got CURIOUS about how they patched that in, and started looking at it, and I noticed that there are gross disjunctures ( is that a word ? ) in the interactive panoroma. Here is a humble B&W circular NAVCAM panorama of the same location from sol 166 that I happen to have lying around :-)

Notice that the drill spot is to the left of center, in front of the "..URIOSITY" label on the front panel. ( Please don't confuse the breaks in this PTgui generated image with the sort of photoshopping that is evident in the APOD. ) In the APOD this whole area is drawn over and patched in front of the "diving board" or "duckbill", as you will.

I'm impressed by the artfulness of it, but chagrined that this would be passed off as any kind of scientific representation.

[dr_lew]

I made a "spherical" panorama from the sol 177 MAHLI images, and here is an excerpt of it :

Now here is a comparable screen shot of the APOD interactive panorama. You can see that it is a real mess compared to the accurately composed PTgui version:

I don't know what they think they're doing.