
The Sun's New Trans-Neptunian Planet (1930) - Petiver
https://www.sciencenews.org/archive/suns-new-trans-neptunian-planet
======
geertj
The English in that paper is beautiful. Also it contains a full two paragraphs
of personal background on the discoverer. The background seems a lot more
humble that we're used to today. "The family moved to Kansas in 1922, where I
assisted my father in raising wheat."

~~~
lfowles
Tombaugh came up a lot when doing Famous Kansan reports in school :)

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zhte415
Perhaps Pluto
[https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/nh...](https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/nh-
pluto-7-11-15.jpg)

~~~
raverbashing
One small note: these images are kind of weird to me.

It seems they have been artificially sharpened and enlarged

The other pictures NH took of the Jovian system look more natural to me

(or maybe they're really weird features of Pluto that will become clearer one
bigger res pictures are taken)

~~~
arrrg
The CCD used in LORRI (Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager) takes 1024 × 1024
pixel monochrome (350 nm to 850 nm wavelength light) images. Currently Pluto
is still quite small on that sensor, but rapidly getting larger.

You can see the original (sort of, see below for more information) images
here: [http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-
Encounter/](http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encounter/)

On the image linked in the comment you are responding to, Pluto has been
enlarged about four to five times its size (from 120 pixels across to nearly
600), but I don’t think whoever did that used anything more than a bog-
standard proportional resampling algorithm, the kind everyone uses when they
enlarge photos.

Expect images where no one will feel the need to resample and enlarge them in
a couple days.

Oh, and here is the promised section, directly copied from that website, on
what kind of processing has been done to those images before posting them to
the web:

“The images posted at this website have been processed by ground-based LORRI
calibration software, which removes the CCD bias level, corrects for CCD
readout smear (LORRI does not have an aperture shutter, which creates smear as
the image is transferred from the optically active region of the CCD to the
storage region of the CCD), and corrects for pixel-to-pixel sensitivity
variations.

“LORRI images typically contain a handful of cosmic ray strikes, which are not
removed by the calibration processing. These often appear as single, bright
pixels, but sometimes they produce streaks of several bright pixels. They are
usually fairly easily distinguished from the images of real astronomical
objects (e.g., stars, planets, or satellites).

“LORRI images are recorded on the spacecraft as 12-bit integers with light
level values from 0 to 4095. The groundbased calibration processing converts
the images to 32-bit double-precision numbers. For display on this web page,
the calibrated images are then converted to 8-bit JPEG files (i.e., images
with 256 intensity levels) using a linear scaling stretch that maps the
minimum intensity in the calibrated image to 0 and the maximum intensity to
255. Thus, the web images do not record the actual CCD signal level; nor do
they retain the full dynamic range of the original images. As a result, some
images that appear blank on this page actually have important data in them,
but this cannot be seen in the automatically-converted 8-bit JPEGs posted
here.

“The following ancillary information is provided for each image posted: the
date of the observation in coordinated universal time (UTC) at the New
Horizons spacecraft, the exposure time of the image in milliseconds, the name
of the target, the range to the target in kilometers (i.e., the distance
between the New Horizons spacecraft and the target; for example, 12.1M km
means 12.1 million kilometers), and the root filename of the image.”

Quoted from [http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-
Encounter/lorri_about.php](http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-
Encounter/lorri_about.php)

~~~
raverbashing
Thanks, this is a very good explanation

I had checked the site and really, the LORRI images are still tiny

For example this one [http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-
Encounter/data/pluto/level...](http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-
Encounter/data/pluto/level2/lor/jpeg/029889/lor_0298893504_0x630_sci_1.jpg)

It looks more natural when seen in its real size.

Can't wait for the close-up pictures

------
ChrisGranger
If only Clyde Tombaugh could have lived to see where we are now...

