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This is the most incredible picture I have ever seen. In May, the best picture of Pluto was a couple blown up pixels. Now, it looks like a render from a Pixar m

This is the most incredible picture I have ever seen. In May, the best picture of Pluto was a couple blown up pixels. Now, it looks like a render from a Pixar movie. https://twitter.com/tothur/status/620601134651166720/photo/1 https://twitter.com/tothur/status/620601134651166720/photo/1

steckerbrett 11y ago
I'm still amazed we knew about its existence any time prior, the best picture we had in may is just 9 pixels wide. There's more visual information in Google's favicon.
- colechristensen 11y ago
  However, it's not quite true. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/pluto-20100204.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/pluto-2010... Shows better the previous best.
  - teraflop 11y ago
    Those represent our previous best information about the surface of Pluto, but they're not individual photos -- they're composite reconstructions from a number of different images taken over a long period of time, as the planet rotated. > The Hubble images are a few pixels wide. But through a technique called dithering, multiple, slightly offset pictures can be combined through computer-image processing to synthesize a higher-resolution view than could be seen in a single exposure. "This has taken four years and 20 computers operating continuously and simultaneously to accomplish," says Buie, who developed special algorithms to sharpen the Hubble data.
    - Zardoz84 11y ago
      It's interesting notice that the white heart and the black whale could be found on these maps.
  - k_ 11y ago
    Stunning how they were close to the reality with those! There's all the major features of Pluto in there.
pserwylo 11y ago
For a more interactive version of this, check out the visualization by ABC News in Australia: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-09/pluto-comes-into-focus/6566818 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-09/pluto-comes-into-focus... This shows a time slider, where you can see the different images, along with the time and distance from Pluto. They have been pretty quick to update it with new images too, so I look forward to the final image(s?) being added.
- hohenheim 11y ago
  Any idea why the colour changes from grey to sepia between 12'th and 13'th July?
  - semiel 11y ago
    The "sepia" is actually true color. New Horizon's high resolution camera takes black and white photos, but NASA sometimes releases them supplemented with color information from other sensors.
    - hohenheim 11y ago
      Thanks. It turns out the coloured pictures are taken by Ralph [1]. One of the three cameras on New Horizon. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-camera-behind-the-new-horizons-pluto-photos-ralph/398549/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-ca...
    - nkoren 11y ago
      Argh, I was just preparing to write a rant about this. No, it is absolutely not true-color -- although this is something which NASA insists on claiming, to its detriment. It annoyed me when they used the same technique to show a "true color" view of the surface of Titan[1], and it's annoying me again now. What this image shows is the average color Pluto. The colour information comes from a much lower-resolution image, which was unable to resolve color differences between regions. In truth, Pluto could be wildly multi-colored -- but these kind of images, tagged with the "true color" label, lead you to think that that Pluto (and Titan) are a boring uniform sepia. To understand just how wrong it is to label these images as "true color", try the following experiment: 1: Find a nice colorful picture of, say, a rose garden. 2: On a satellite image, find the color-value of that rose garden at, say, a spatial resolution of 50km per pixel. 3: Take the color-value of that pixel -- which, on earth, will range from a muddy greyish-brown to a muddy greyish-blue -- and apply that hue to the entire image. You will now have a very sorry-looking rose-garden. 4: Release the image accompanied by a press release claiming that this is a "true-color" view of said rose-garden. See the problem with this? Honestly, the folks at NASA are geniuses, but they really need to stop doing this kind of thing. One thing they don't understand very well is human perception and psychology. If you show people a greyscale image, they will assume that it represents something which is actually more colorful, and their imagination can take it from there. On the other hand, if you show people an image which is colorised with a uniform color, they will assume that is the actual color -- especially if you've then gone on to tell them that it's a true-color image. In truth, it's no more "true-color" than the final image in the rose-garden experiment above. This, unfortunately, convinces people that they're looking at something far more drab than they actually are. Tl;dr: Where NASA lacks actual color imagery, they really shouldn't colorise pictures with a uniform hue and then call them "true color". It's bordering on false to do so, and results in images which are much more drab than a simple black-and-white image would be, and possible much more drab than reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(moon)#/media/File:Huygens_surface_color.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(moon)#/media/File:Huyge...
frikk 11y ago
Astro-noob here. Why can't we get better pictures from our telescopes, given that we can take what seems to be high quality pictures of things much further away? Is it because of how "small" pluto is, versus say a large galaxy or nebula.
- aperiodic 11y ago
  It is exactly that: Pluto is a very tiny astronomical object. Galaxies, nebulae, and such are much further away than Pluto, but that is more than made up for by how mind-boggingly large they are. For example, The Andromeda Galaxy is about six full moons wide as viewed from Earth[1]. [1]: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/01/01/moon_and_andromeda_relative_size_in_the_sky.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/01/01/moon_and...
  - imh 11y ago
    It's amazing. It almost makes me feel sick to realize how large it would appear, despite how unimaginably far away it is. It simply does not compute.
  - IndianAstronaut 11y ago
    There are an estimated 1 trillion stars in the Andromeda galaxy.
    - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
      It's kind of a shame humanity evolved in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. If we'd evolved in one of the Magellanic Clouds, we'd see an astounding squashed spiral view of this galaxy with direct line of sight of the bright nucleus.
      - JupiterMoon 11y ago
        Meanwhile if there are life forms in Magellanic Clouds they are probably looking at the spiral arms thinking that it is a shame that they did not evolve in a galaxy proper...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jgrahamc 11y ago
The picture on the left is 8-bit Pluto.

steckerbrett 11y ago

I'm still amazed we knew about its existence any time prior, the best picture we had in may is just 9 pixels wide. There's more visual information in Google's favicon.

colechristensen 11y ago
However, it's not quite true. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/pluto-20100204.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/pluto-2010... Shows better the previous best.
- teraflop 11y ago
  Those represent our previous best information about the surface of Pluto, but they're not individual photos -- they're composite reconstructions from a number of different images taken over a long period of time, as the planet rotated. > The Hubble images are a few pixels wide. But through a technique called dithering, multiple, slightly offset pictures can be combined through computer-image processing to synthesize a higher-resolution view than could be seen in a single exposure. "This has taken four years and 20 computers operating continuously and simultaneously to accomplish," says Buie, who developed special algorithms to sharpen the Hubble data.
  - Zardoz84 11y ago
    It's interesting notice that the white heart and the black whale could be found on these maps.
- k_ 11y ago
  Stunning how they were close to the reality with those! There's all the major features of Pluto in there.

pserwylo 11y ago

For a more interactive version of this, check out the visualization by ABC News in Australia: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-09/pluto-comes-into-focus/6566818 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-09/pluto-comes-into-focus... This shows a time slider, where you can see the different images, along with the time and distance from Pluto. They have been pretty quick to update it with new images too, so I look forward to the final image(s?) being added.

hohenheim 11y ago
Any idea why the colour changes from grey to sepia between 12'th and 13'th July?
- semiel 11y ago
  The "sepia" is actually true color. New Horizon's high resolution camera takes black and white photos, but NASA sometimes releases them supplemented with color information from other sensors.
  - hohenheim 11y ago
    Thanks. It turns out the coloured pictures are taken by Ralph [1]. One of the three cameras on New Horizon. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-camera-behind-the-new-horizons-pluto-photos-ralph/398549/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-ca...
  - nkoren 11y ago
    Argh, I was just preparing to write a rant about this. No, it is absolutely not true-color -- although this is something which NASA insists on claiming, to its detriment. It annoyed me when they used the same technique to show a "true color" view of the surface of Titan[1], and it's annoying me again now. What this image shows is the average color Pluto. The colour information comes from a much lower-resolution image, which was unable to resolve color differences between regions. In truth, Pluto could be wildly multi-colored -- but these kind of images, tagged with the "true color" label, lead you to think that that Pluto (and Titan) are a boring uniform sepia. To understand just how wrong it is to label these images as "true color", try the following experiment: 1: Find a nice colorful picture of, say, a rose garden. 2: On a satellite image, find the color-value of that rose garden at, say, a spatial resolution of 50km per pixel. 3: Take the color-value of that pixel -- which, on earth, will range from a muddy greyish-brown to a muddy greyish-blue -- and apply that hue to the entire image. You will now have a very sorry-looking rose-garden. 4: Release the image accompanied by a press release claiming that this is a "true-color" view of said rose-garden. See the problem with this? Honestly, the folks at NASA are geniuses, but they really need to stop doing this kind of thing. One thing they don't understand very well is human perception and psychology. If you show people a greyscale image, they will assume that it represents something which is actually more colorful, and their imagination can take it from there. On the other hand, if you show people an image which is colorised with a uniform color, they will assume that is the actual color -- especially if you've then gone on to tell them that it's a true-color image. In truth, it's no more "true-color" than the final image in the rose-garden experiment above. This, unfortunately, convinces people that they're looking at something far more drab than they actually are. Tl;dr: Where NASA lacks actual color imagery, they really shouldn't colorise pictures with a uniform hue and then call them "true color". It's bordering on false to do so, and results in images which are much more drab than a simple black-and-white image would be, and possible much more drab than reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(moon)#/media/File:Huygens_surface_color.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(moon)#/media/File:Huyge...

frikk 11y ago

Astro-noob here. Why can't we get better pictures from our telescopes, given that we can take what seems to be high quality pictures of things much further away? Is it because of how "small" pluto is, versus say a large galaxy or nebula.

aperiodic 11y ago
It is exactly that: Pluto is a very tiny astronomical object. Galaxies, nebulae, and such are much further away than Pluto, but that is more than made up for by how mind-boggingly large they are. For example, The Andromeda Galaxy is about six full moons wide as viewed from Earth[1]. [1]: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/01/01/moon_and_andromeda_relative_size_in_the_sky.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/01/01/moon_and...
- imh 11y ago
  It's amazing. It almost makes me feel sick to realize how large it would appear, despite how unimaginably far away it is. It simply does not compute.
- IndianAstronaut 11y ago
  There are an estimated 1 trillion stars in the Andromeda galaxy.
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    It's kind of a shame humanity evolved in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. If we'd evolved in one of the Magellanic Clouds, we'd see an astounding squashed spiral view of this galaxy with direct line of sight of the bright nucleus.
    - JupiterMoon 11y ago
      Meanwhile if there are life forms in Magellanic Clouds they are probably looking at the spiral arms thinking that it is a shame that they did not evolve in a galaxy proper...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

jgrahamc 11y ago

The picture on the left is 8-bit Pluto.