5 ms·
I can't tell from the writeup, is the animation speed a reasonably accurate analog of how fast New Horizons passed Pluto?
by minikites 11y ago
I can't tell from the writeup, is the animation speed a reasonably accurate analog of how fast New Horizons passed Pluto?
- idlewords 11y agoEach orbit of Pluto and Charon around each other takes 6.4 days. This is speeded up by a factor of a lot.
- minikites 11y agoThat makes more sense, I read quite a few articles emphasizing just how fast New Horizons was going so I got carried away.
- kipi 11y agoThe speed is relatively consistent except for the early frames (where pictures were taken at twice the rate of later on) and where frames were dropped due to missing data or alignment failure. Here's a version of the animation where frame duration is proportional to the real time between the frames: http://i.imgur.com/ncTIdHL.gif http://i.imgur.com/ncTIdHL.gif The animation spans 3 months or so. The real time is shown in the text in the corner.
- minikites 11y agoNeat, thanks for sharing this!
- spartanatreyu 11y agoFixing your link: http://i.imgur.com/ncTIdHL.gifv http://i.imgur.com/ncTIdHL.gifv Using ".gifv" in the link sends a video instead of a gif, way smaller file size and higher quality animations are better for everyone.