
Pluto ‘Wows’ in Spectacular New Backlit Panorama - adventured
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/pluto-wows-in-spectacular-new-backlit-panorama
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dvh
If this is not astro picture of the year, I don't know what is:
[http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/nh-...](http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/nh-
apluto-wide-9-17-15-final_0.png)

~~~
psygong2
It's a black and white photo of rocks and ice.

It's interesting that it is Pluto, but photo of the year? Why?

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deathcakes
Because this is the furthest away from Earth that we've managed to photograph
in any real detail.

Because exploration. I really get depressed reading comments like yours, and I
don't mean to have a go at you, I understand where you're coming from. It just
upsets me that you can look at the product of an over ten year mission and
dismiss it with such casual disdain, as if this isn't something that is
literally at the limits of what we as a species can do. This is what we were
meant to do, what we are programmed to do since birth - explore.

The reason it depresses me is because an overwhelming majority think like you
- liek wtf is roks innit who cares. And this is why we spend so much time and
effort on inwardly focussed nonsense and no time at all, given what we could
do, on exploration and actual achievement.

So yeah. It is just rocks and ice. You are right. By so observing, however,
you have missed the point so completely that you have made me sad for the
entire human species. Well done.

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nitrogen
Furthermore, some "rocks" may be water ice and the "ice" is probably nitrogen
ice, so it's not even ordinary rocks and ice.

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heyitskevin
For a visual of how far away Pluto really is from Earth(and really how far
away everything in our solar system is from eachother) I recommend checking
out Riding Light [https://vimeo.com/117815404](https://vimeo.com/117815404)

"This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light
emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the
solar system, from a human perspective."

The video is 45 minutes long and makes it just past Jupiter. It would have to
be 5.5 hours long to show Pluto.

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gulpahum
Another way to understand the distances is the old scroll-through solar
system. If the moon is one pixel, then Pluto is pretty far away.

[http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.h...](http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html)

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r3bl
Man, how silly does it sound that I'm struggling to travel 40 kilometres twice
a week when I passed the 1 billion kilometres mark here and still haven't
reached Saturn.

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WhitneyLand
After recovering from a moment of awe, I wonder why can't the photos be in
color if it has full spectrum visible light sensors? From the description:

"Ralph consists of three panchromatic (black-and-white) and four color imagers
inside its Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), as well as an infrared
compositional mapping spectrometer called the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral
Array (LEISA)."

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bendykstra
New Horizons team member John Spencer answered that question on the Unmanned
Spaceflight forum:

 _Yes, this was a single channel image (we wouldn 't have held out on you if
we'd had color!). Several of our closest MVIC images were b/w rather than
color, because of limited time near closest approach- we can take B/W images
faster than color ones, and they allow higher-res LORRI riders. We still don't
know what color the haze is, though we'll have lower-resolution high-phase
color images soon, which will answer that question._

[http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=8071&...](http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=8071&st=255&p=226394&#entry226394)

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rootbear
I made one of these my cover image on Facebook and called it The Ice Mountains
of Pluto, which is a Golden Age Science Fiction story title if I ever heard
one. But this isn't SF! It's a real photo! That was taken by an atomic powered
robot! Amazing...

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dddrh
Not entirely related, but I'm guessing you would enjoy reading Atomic Robo[1].
It's a comic (that has all 9 volumes for free online and the 10th is being
released a page at a time daily) that follows an atomic powered robot built by
Nikola Tesla.

Steven Hawking is a nemesis of Robo, Carl Sagan helped our hero get to Mars
with Voyager, and there is a talking Dr. Dinosaur who claims that he time
traveled to our time using crystals.

I recommend starting at the beginning.

[1][http://www.atomic-robo.com/atomicrobo/v1ch1-cover](http://www.atomic-
robo.com/atomicrobo/v1ch1-cover)

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rootbear
Thanks, I'll check it out.

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maze-le
I didn't thought that the atmosphere would be so visible, after all it is
estimated to be just about 3-300 µbar.

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johnm1019
> This new view of Pluto’s crescent -- taken by New Horizons’ wide-angle
> Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC)

Since this is a multispectral image it might not look like that to the human
eye. I like this version better though!

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tgb
Huh, I would have assumed that a multispectral camera would have (false)
colors. What does that mean here? The frequency response of each pixel's light
sensor has multiple peaks instead of a nice 'bell curve' shape?

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icegreentea
'False color' is a post processing step. It doesn't matter what your source of
the signal is, at some step when you make the image ready for human
consumption (especially for web consumption), you get to decide how to map
each of your channels to RGB (or whatever). When your sensors are RGB, then
mapping directly to RGB makes sense. But you could swap green and red, and end
up with a 'False Color'.

Remember, within each channel (doesn't matter how broad its frequency
sensitivity is), the values you get are 'grayscale'.

Its perfectly legitimate to take multi sprectral data and collapse it down to
gray scale (this is after all how we fake grayscale pictures taken on most
digital cameras now).

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andy_ppp
Those mountains! Anyone know how high they are - they look enormous.

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andy_ppp
A quick Google reveals 2 miles high or so. There must be some weird geology
going on on Pluto!

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loblollyboy
guessing less atmosphere = less erosion

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danielbln
Less gravity too.

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pavel_lishin
I wonder what the tidal forces are like in the Pluto/Charon system.

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javaru
Pluto and Charon are mutually tidally locked, meaning they always show the
same face to each other. So the tidal forces would be very constant.

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joshontheweb
Wow, I got chills looking at these images!

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vegabook
...as you should... the surface temperature is -229 degrees centigrade.

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DavidWanjiru
If the moon were only one pixel: a tediously accurate scale model of the solar
system ~
[http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.h...](http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html)
[Edit: Best viewed on a PC, I think. I don't know if this will work on a
phone/tablet.]

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qbi_
Breathtaking picture.

I'm surprised no one has yet generated 3D models from what we've received so
far. Surely we could somehow algorithmically extract at least partial height
information from the shadows? I gave it a quick try previously but to no
avail.

Would anyone know how to start?

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anigbrowl
You'd start with detailed information about the camera itself, to factor out
aberrations related to the lens and the sensor. After that I'd imagine the
most efficient approach would be differential feature mapping from multiple
photos taking into account the known facts about trajectory, speed etc.

Conceptually it's simple, just very very intensive in terms of the amount of
computation required...but well within the capabilities of NASA or even
dedicated amateur researchers. As I understand it we are still slowly
downloading pictures from the flyby and there is more to come (although it
will be of lower resolution from here on out if NASA is releasing them in
order of acquisition). Once the complete set has been compiled I imagine that
creating a 3d model would be a high priority.

You could look into how Google did their Moon and Mars virtual environments,
though I understand they also had the benefit of radar/lidar mapping data as
well as optical.

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jay-saint
This makes a great Dual screen desktop background.

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bmoresbest55
Those pictures are pretty amazing. Something so far away from the sun having
so many features. It really makes you wonder how that stuff got there.

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tonylemesmer
Those "hills" look like clouds to me (in 3rd image), the shadows appear to
indicate a gap between the object and the surface.

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T-zex
Probably they are made from the same material as clouds.

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gao8a
These shots are outstanding, I can make out very familiar glacial features
(carved by solid nitrogen!)

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natewevans
Striking. Kudos.

