Arexack_Heretic wrote:
Probably Rik has more recent knowledge on this topic than me, he's the resident space exploration buff.
I just like to be right.

Heh.. FWIW: This is actually quite a 'hairy' topic...
re: Mars: the most prevalent working colour for the atmosphere is 'butterscotch' but there is no end to the debate wether this is actually really correct.
Anyone old enough to remember the first Viking pictures will recall it showed Mars with an atmosphere close to blue-whitish, very Earthlike. Took everyone by surprize, but soon afterwards, NASA released calibrated pics, showing the 'proper' colour, reddish-brown.
Of course, fine people like Richard Hoagwas^H^H^H^Hland will tell you this is all part of a big conspiracy to err.. um, yeah...
But to be fair, the colour-calibration is not a 100% sure way to show you pictures of how Mars would look like if you set foot there yourself. For starters, the CCD's used are reacting to light slightly different as the human eye does, every human has a slightly different colour-experience, the filters used by, say Spirit and Opportunity rovers are there to add scientific value, not to woo the unwashed masses, so they are not optimised to reproduce TRU-KOLOR(TM)

as seen in an IMAX studio near you etc. etc.
And then you have all monitors, printers etc. not created the same, the fact that you adjust colours yourself after awhile (walk around in a room partially w/ filtered lightfrequencies..., and after awhile you don't notice the off-colours)
A good place to see 'real' pics (as close as possible) is Cornell, where they calibrated the MER camera's...
http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/panc ... mages.html
(And note how their atmospheric pics are less than brilliant: most pics oversaturated etc... )
(EDIT:) this is a good one:
http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/panc ... lls_2.html