My current favorite camera is about to fly past Pluto

[Telecaster]

Its name is LORRI (LOnge Range Reconnaissance Imager). It has a 1mp square monochrome sensor and comes fitted with a 2620mm f/12.6 reflex lens and supplementary field-flattening optics. I've attached the most recent publicly available photo taken with it: Pluto and its largest moon, Charon.

The Pluto flyby happens next Tuesday, with hi-res imagery to follow. The highest available res in the short term will be 400 meters per pixel of the planet's surface. The real good stuff will start coming in during September, and it'll take the better part of a year for the New Horizons spacecraft to upload it all.

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/06240556-what-to-expect-new-horizons-pluto.html

-Dave-

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

That photo is already mind boggling for anyone my age. When I was a kid, there seemed no possibility that anyone would ever be able to take a meaningful photo of Pluto. The official discovery of Pluto was announced about 9 years before I was born, and it was demoted from planethood  in 2006.

Thanks for sharing this. I look forward to the high-res images to come.

[kers]

+1  Thanks for sharing.

I very much enjoy these kind of pictures that show something unseen...
 

[Telecaster]

I've attached the latest photo of Charon, Pluto's largest moon, taken yesterday (I think) and uploaded & released today. New Horizons is currently photographing in its equivalent of highest-res burst mode. We won't see more than a few of those pics for awhile.

-Dave-

[spidermike]

Knowing where they are coming from, those images take on a sort of mythical quality themselves.

Apparently the data rate is so slow it will take about 16 months to transmit all the data it captured in a few hours.

[Telecaster]

I've attached one more photo of Pluto, released this morning. It's had some deconvolution processing applied. Tomorrow morning there'll be one last pre-flyby pic released, at much higher resolution.

-Dave-

[Telecaster]

NASA is currently receiving several high-res color images. Attached is a "sneak preview"…not a LORRI image. Very cool!  

[Edit: actually this is a LORRI image but it's been colorized with data from the Ralph camera. Ralph is New Horizons' main imager, taking pics in RGB + near IR.]

[Edit redux: Ralph's four imagers use red, clear (monochrome), blue & IR filters respectively. Green is interpolated when desired (as in publicly-released color images). But the mono imager gives scientists all the data in the "green" range they need.]

-Dave-

[Otto Phocus]

Knowing where they are coming from, those images take on a sort of mythical quality themselves.

Apparently the data rate is so slow it will take about 16 months to transmit all the data it captured in a few hours.

Pluto being about 7.5 billion kilometers away from the earth is almost  40 Au's or about 5 Light Hours away from us.

I still have problems conceiving of distances that large and from a galactic viewpoint, the Earth and Pluto are "adjacent"...  Yikes!

[BJL]

Its name is LORRI (LOnge Range Reconnaissance Imager). It has a 1mp square monochrome sensor and comes fitted with a 2620mm f/12.6 reflex lens and supplementary field-flattening optics.

Thanks for the posts and images -- I too am excited by these first close images of my favorite dwarf planet and it moons.

To parody some recent forum post clichés, "amateurs crave high pixel counts and low f-stops; professionals work on getting the camera in the right place at the right time."

[spidermike]

To parody some recent forum post clichés, "amateurs crave high pixel counts and low f-stops; professionals work on getting the camera in the right place at the right time."

What's that old refrain - 'Buy a prime and zoom with your feet'


"OK, darling, I'm just off out to take picture of Pluto....I may be some time"

[Telecaster]

Pluto being about 7.5 billion kilometers away from the earth is almost  40 Au's or about 5 Light Hours away from us.

I still have problems conceiving of distances that large and from a galactic viewpoint, the Earth and Pluto are "adjacent"...  Yikes!

It's mindblowing to consider that, even after getting a gravity-assisted speedup from Jupiter in early 2007, it took New Horizons an additional 8+ years—at ~14.5km/s relative to the Sun—to reach Pluto. And that's still well within the gravitational dominance of one star out of hundreds of billions in one galaxy out of (at least) hundreds of billions. In an observable universe made up mainly of the space in-between those galaxies.

Yikes indeed!

-Dave-

[Telecaster]

xkcd has a funny take on today's Pluto pic:

http://xkcd.com/1551/



-Dave-

[BobDavid]

Pluto and Pluto

[Telecaster]

All New Horizons systems nominal. Pluto flyby successful! Now the real fun begins. We should see a couple nifty hi-res (though likely loss-y compressed) images tomorrow. Then a 6–8 week gap before the uncompressed stuff starts trickling in.

Pluto and Pluto

There's also this (attachment #1).

And, more ominously, this (attachment #2).



-Dave-

[Telecaster]

Fascinating: both Pluto and Charon are geologically active. Not much cratering. Wonder what's powering it? (Radioactivity would be my initial guess…) Check out the water ice mountains on Pluto in the attached crop of a pic released today. 3500 meter (~11,000 foot) peaks!

-Dave-

[BJL]

A nice visual history of getting closer for a better shot:

From the gallery http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/images/index.html

[Alan Klein]

It looks like a planet to me.

[Telecaster]

NASA has released two more LORRI pics from July 13, as tonally flat and fairly compresssed JPEGs. Nevertheless I've attached my take on each pic. Charon first, then Pluto.

I don't get into the "is it or isn't it a planet?" thing. Given that Pluto and Charon clearly orbit a common gravitational center, what they are for sure is a binary system. And fascinating places regardless of whatever arbitrary labels we give them.

-Dave-

[BJL]

I don't get into the "is it or isn't it a planet?" thing. Given that Pluto and Charon clearly orbit a common gravitational center ...

A dwarf planet is like an adolescent: it orbits the sun and has grown enough (by gathering junk from its orbit?) to be made spherical by its own gravity (just like a real, grown-up planet) but has not yet grown enough to clean up its room: Pluto and its moons have not gravitationally sucked in all the other junk in their orbital path, the way that the "gang of eight" planets have.

Frankly, the reclassification was to avoid adding numerous new planets now being discovered out in the Kuiper Belt where Pluto lives.  Astrologers would have been very confused!

And yes: Charon looks just as much like a planet, and binary planets are cool!

[Telecaster]

Frankly, the reclassification was to avoid adding numerous new planets now being discovered out in the Kuiper Belt where Pluto lives.  Astrologers would have been very confused!

  I think Pluto's reclassification was handled clumsily but the logic behind it makes sense. OTOH I wouldn't have minded classifying Eris and maybe one or two other Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) as fully fledged planets either. But I can't manage to get worked up about it either way…

-Dave-