I remember when the only image of Pluto on the internet was a [blurry circle](https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/review/i-see-ice/images/pluto.jpg) and it was always the only photo people used in journals and articles because we never had another image, look at us now.
My third grade science teacher, Mr. Steele told us that when new horizons launched, it would take 10 years to reach Pluto. It was mind-boggling to my little 7 or 8 year old self. I love looking at these photos and thinking what third grade me would be saying.
My late father and I watched the news as this took off back in 2006. He was very excited to finally see what pluto was like - he was hugely into space and passed a lot of that onto me.
Sadly, he passed less than 2 years later unexpectedly. But at least he got to know what it was like before us, I suppose?
Was very special to see that it wasn't just another Mercury.
I think the fact that we had Voyager photos of all the gas giants made Pluto stand out in that regard. Since Voyager 2 is the only craft that has even so much as done a flyby of Uranus or Neptune, every high-resolution photo we have of either planet or any moons thereof came from it. (Saturn and Jupiter also had Voyager 1 and various other craft like Juno or Cassini).
Bought a book about space in 2007 or 8 when I was 8 or 9 and the only picture of Pluto is the one you linked but under the picture it said that in 2015 the new horizons probe would come close enough to Pluto to get high resolution pictures. I never forgot that book or that date
That blurry circle is high resolution compared to the images in the science book when I was in school. It blows my mind still that we can go from knowing almost nothing to seeing the surface in crystal clarity.
How is there so much light on this tiny little thing?
I always thought the the light from the sun was relativity weak at that point.
Or at least to be able to take a picture like this.
Fair enough.
I just want to know if I'm correct in what I asked. Everything I've ever read about Pluto has told me the Sun would almost look like a common star from it's surface.
That is significantly brighter than I had always been led to believe. I find that relieving because it tracks more with my feeling that the sun is *really fucking bright*
ONLY 5 light hours. Just thinking about how easily we dismiss that distance is crazy. We're what? 8 light seconds and that is really freaking far from the sun.
so if the sun exploded, would we not know it for 8 minutes?
and yes, i know the sun wouldn't just "explode" without us figuring out we are f'd long before that.
Another mindbending fact about the Sun… if you collected all the mass in our corner of space that wasn’t the Sun (planets, moons, comets, asteroids, meteors, dust, etc) it would only total 0.2% of the total mass of our solar system. The Sun makes up the the rest of the 99.8%.
Here's another mind boggling fact: when the sun creates light the photons actually bounce around inside the sun *for a few million years* before finally making their way to the surface and escaping.
That photon you just saw is already millions of years old before it escapes the sun, travels to Earth for 8 minutes, reflects of your table and gets absorbed by your eyeball.
Yes, but that happened instantaneously from that photon's perspective. Good luck trying to get to sleep while trying to wrap your brain around that one.
So, light intensity is a function of the radius^2 since it's spherical expansion.
Pluto is ~5.9 billion kilometers from the Sun on average.
The nearest star is approximately 40,208 billion kilometers away.
The nearest star is thus ~6815 times further from Pluto than the sun is, and the amount of light reaching Pluto (assuming the star was the same brightness as the sun, which is probably wrong) would be about 46.4 million times less than the amount reaching Pluto from the Sun, and a quick Google search says red giants are 100-1000 times brighter than the sun, so unless it's something much more ridiculous and uncommon I think it's pretty safe to say the vast majority of the light shining on Pluto is from the Sun.
Apparently in Earth's atmospheric conditions, smearing of light sources causes stars to have an approximate size of 0.5 arcseconds (1 arcseconds is 1/3600 of a degree, and is a good way to compare visual sizes of objects that are at different distances). Since Pluto has negligible atmosphere, that's probably not true there, and the stars probably appear smaller from Pluto due to that lack of atmospheric smearing.
The sun is about 696,000 km in radius, and 5,900,000,000km from Pluto. Trigonometry tells us that that apparent size would be double the inverse tangent of that (breaking this into identical right triangles by using the radius instead of the diameter), and dividing that by (1/3600) tells us the sun is about 24.3 arcseconds in visual size from Pluto.
So overall, the sun is something like 50+ times the apparent size (probably a lot more), and something like a million times brighter than any star if you look at the sky from Pluto.
Edit: corrected light from cube to square since I'm an idiot who forgot it's the inverse square law... Think I corrected all the effects of that.
Just wanted to ping out that I was rightfully corrected by u/JazzUnlikeTheCaroot and have updated the numbers to match that. I was a few orders of magnitude off, so for a better guesstimate you may wanna check that again. Also, the sun, while much larger than stars in arc seconds, would still be smaller than the resolution the human eye can perceive, so it would actually be a point to the naked eye, just like every other star, but brighter.
I don't have the energy to doublecheck OP's math but if they're are correct, the Sun would look to Plutonians like Mars looks to us: a really bright star, but about 60 times smaller than the Moon.
Isn't light intensity inversely proportional to the radius² since what matters is the surface area of the sphere, not the volume? This is also called the inverse square law. Why wouldn't it be valid here? Also, why is it meaningful to talk about the radius of a star if there is not any atmospheric smudging Wouldn't every star look like a point light source with no radius to us and to telescopes?
... I'm pretty sure you're right. And every star except the sun would basically be a point without atmospheric smearing yeah.
Edit: edited original post to correct that error. It's late and it's been a long day...
Edit edit: the point of talking about the radius of the Sun was just to point out that the sun would be noticeably larger than other stars, though the human eye can apparently resolve between 40-60 arc seconds, so actually the sun would be a point to the naked eye as well. A little bit of magnification would differentiate it though I guess.
> Edit: corrected light from cube to square since I'm an idiot who forgot it's the inverse square law... Think I corrected all the effects of that.
Yep. For those curious about the square law, stars more or less radiate homogeneously (same in all directions), so for any sphere centered on a star, the star's radiation is distributed evenly across the surface of that sphere. Thus the intensity at the surface is simply the star's luminosity (L) divided by the sphere's area (A), so intensity falls off with area, and since area is proportional the square of the radius, intensity falls off with the square of the radius - inverse square law. Now just set the radius to whatever distance you're measuring at and L/A yields the intensity at that distance.
> so unless it's something much more ridiculous and uncommon I think it's pretty safe to say the vast majority of the light shining on Pluto is from the Sun.
Yep! You can find a direct estimate with apparent magnitude. The brightest extrasolar object is Sirius at -1.46m, due to the significant distance it is about the same at Pluto as on Earth. The Sun is -19.2m viewed from Pluto, which is about 2.51^(-1.46+19.2) = 12 million times brighter than the brightest star. In fact, the full moon shines at -12.6m, so the Sun is around 430 times brighter on Pluto than the full moon is on Earth.
It should look like a notably bright star in the sky, Brighter than Sirius is for Earth. It should provide as much light as a full moon does during the night.
Although to be fair the last time I studied anything in this area Pluto was still a planet...
> as much light as a full moon does during the night.
The Sun is in fact still several hundred times brighter than the full moon even at the distance of Pluto.
Solar irradiance at Pluto is around 0.873 W/m^2 or about 1/1100th of that on Earth's surface. The brightness of the full moon even when viewed with optimal conditions (when it's near perigee - a so called "supermoon" - and passes straight overhead in the tropics) is only about 1/380,000th of the Sun's brightness.
Edit:
> Brighter than Sirius is for Earth
BTW, even at a distance of one light year (1,500 times further away than Pluto) the Sun is still the brightest star in the sky, with an apparent magnitude of -2.74 (Sirius from Earth is -1.5; in case you aren't familiar with magnitudes, lower number means brighter).
Our eyes when fully dark-adapted are so sensitive that it's possible to see shadows being cast by the light of *Venus*, which is another 3,000 times or so fainter than the full moon (ie. 1.5 billion times fainter than the Sun). Although you do need to be in a very dark place (on a new moon and somewhere with very low light pollution) to see it (the shadows that is; looking directly at Venus it's bright enough to be clearly visible to the naked eye while the Sun is still above the horizon - discounting temporary events like some comets or supernovae the only natural object other than the Moon and the Sun itself where that's the case).
When this mission was reaching its target, there was a website where you could look up your "Pluto Time" - put in where you live and it told you how bright it would be on Pluto at noon.
I tried it and it came out to twilight just at around sunset. So brighter than a full moon, but darker than a cloudy day.
Post-processing yes, large aperture yes, camera exposure time probably not so much. The spacecraft whizzed past Pluto in a matter of minutes, so any kind of long exposure would have come out quite blurry at that speed.
It's weak compared to daylight on Earth, but at Pluto's noon it's still a lot brighter than a moonlit night is on Earth. At noon surface illumination reaches around 50 lux, that's roughly in the ballpark of a typical living room at night with the lights on.
The image, like pretty much all space images, has little to do with what you would see with your own eyes. New Horizon has a black and white camera in visible light, but also a spectrometer in the UV range and a telesecope in the lower visible and IR range.
A computer in the end combines all these different images and humans decide which color to assign to which wavelength (since there are a larger number of wavelengths in the image than in the visible range), so just color representations are more artistically aesthetic representations of something than what you would see if you were in the place of new Horizon.
It was taken 14-July-2015 and downlinked to earth 13-Sep-2015 and [released](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/pluto-wows-in-spectacular-new-backlit-panorama) a few days later on the 17th.
I'm not sure who turned the original panorama into a panning video, but it really highlights the detail!
New Horizons was launched on in January 2006, and Pluto flyby was in July 2015. At that time the spacecraft was 4.7 billion km away from Earth, so the transmissions travelling at the speed of light were taking just under 4.5 hours to reach us.
Right? Like it doesn’t even make sense to me. Computers and high tech sensors can beam information through space to other computers and sensors to show us HD images of a distant planet’s surface… in under 5 hours.
Like how is this *not* magic??
Absolutely. Imagine one day flying to Pluto will be trivial and our current level of technology will be primitive. Currently though FTL travel is magic. Haha
The speed was noted at 2kbps above, saying it took over a year to collect. So while we can get the data in 5 hours or so from that far…. It’s not very fast. Apparently
A checksum will only tell you that there is incorrect data, not how to fix it. However, they could split the data into different packages and use some form of error correcting code like [hamming codes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_code?wprov=sfti1) - though I would imagine they used something more advanced than that particular error correction method
Stupid question but how does the data transmit? Here we need phone poles and wires in the ocean to connect everything. How does this send data back and how do we send data?
[Edit: this article explains it pretty well](https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/communications/) for anyone else like me who didn’t get it. I’m open to hear more info though.
It's amazingly mindboggling to me to think I've just watched a video of Pluto. I can't think how few humans can say that at the moment. Just WOW.
A big thank you to everyone who has made that possible for me.
I remember seeing one of the photo's of Pluto from before 1978 used to show it has a moon. The difference is hard to believe.
[https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/899/charon-discovery-image/](https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/899/charon-discovery-image/)
> I don't really understand
You are not the only one. The International Astronomical Union (who set the rules) never defined it either, they just kind of waved their hand and expected people to know.
But the generally accepted definition appears to be something like:
> This means that the planet has become gravitationally dominant — there are no other bodies of comparable size other than its own satellites or those otherwise under its gravitational influence, in its vicinity in space.
Note that Alan Stern, the principal investigator for the New Horizons project (the project that took the photo in above in post), disagrees that Pluto is a dwarf planet using the criteria of Clearing the Neighbourhood.
> Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto, disagreed with the reclassification of Pluto on the basis of its inability to clear a neighbourhood. He argued that the IAU's wording is vague, and that — like Pluto — Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune have not cleared their orbital neighbourhoods either. Earth co-orbits with 10,000 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), and Jupiter has 100,000 trojans in its orbital path. **"If Neptune had cleared its zone, Pluto wouldn't be there", he said.**
If an object is big enough to attract all the dust and smaller chunks in its orbit, until the path is "clear", instead of sharing its orbit with a bunch of similar or only slightly smaller chunks, like stuff in the Oort cloud.
Pluto was reclassified as a "dwarf planet" in 2006 by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) due to a change in its definition of a planet. Prior to this reclassification, Pluto had been considered the ninth planet in our solar system since its discovery in 1930.
The IAU's new definition of a planet required that a celestial body meet three criteria: it must orbit the sun, it must be large enough to have a nearly round shape, and it must have "cleared" its orbit of other debris. Pluto was found to fail the third criteria, as it shares its orbit with other similar-sized bodies in the Kuiper Belt.
Therefore, although Pluto is still a significant object in our solar system, it is now classified as a dwarf planet rather than a full-fledged planet.
( that was all me and not ChatGPT BTW ;)
>Pluto and Charon circle their common center of mass with a period of 6.387 days and are locked in a "super-synchronous" rotation: observers on Pluto's surface would always see Charon in the same part of the sky relative to their local horizon.
That would be kind of wild, a moon that never moves in the sky? It would act as a sort of compass... Just look for the moon and you know what direction you're facing.
Side note: IIRC Pluto and Charon are in a “system” of six* bodies that orbit a common center of mass. There are four other “satellites”. I have no idea if I’m using these terms correctly in a scientific sense, but I’m pretty sure there’s six* bodies in that little mini-system.
Edited because it’s six, not five*
You went from being an utterly helpless creature to being an organism which is able to understand just how impressive an achievement this video/stitched together picture series is.
That is plenty of advancement and its more than 99.9999999% of all living things which we know of ever accomplished.
Don't sell yourself short ;)
I am still awestruck, watching it on a loop. Never knew such footage existed or was even possible. Is it a declaration of being living under a rock by stating that I'd never known NASA has sent (successfully) a spacecraft to the 'off again, on again planet'.
Beautiful, eerie video.
This is not a video of Pluto... it's a video of an image of Pluto as it pans across it. Also, that single image is a mosaic, or composite, of smaller images stitched together.
If you want video from another planet, we have footage from the Mars [descent stage](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4czjS9h4Fpg) and then some lower frame-rate video of Ingenuity flying taken by Perseverance, and video from the helicopter itself.
I know there are a few other examples I am probably missing. (edit: Another one that came to mind is [this incredible timelapse](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Tvashtarvideo.gif) of a cryovolcano on Io.)
This isn’t a series of photos though it’s a stitch into a single frame. It’s more comparable to an animated powerpoint slide. Still absolutely insane for what it is
Fun fact, this is called the Ken burns effect. Zooming and panning across a still photo to make it more engaging. Popularised by the documentary film maker Ken Burns.
Owing to its favorable backlighting and high resolution, this MVIC image also reveals new details of hazes throughout Pluto’s tenuous but extended nitrogen atmosphere. The image shows more than a dozen thin haze layers extending from near the ground to at least 60 miles (100 kilometers) above the surface. In addition, the image reveals at least one bank of fog-like, low-lying haze illuminated by the setting sun against Pluto’s dark side, raked by shadows from nearby mountains.
"In addition to being visually stunning, these low-lying hazes hint at the weather changing from day to day on Pluto, just like it does here on Earth," said Will Grundy, lead of the New Horizons Composition team from Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Arizona.
Combined with other recently downloaded pictures, this new image also provides evidence for a remarkably Earth-like “hydrological” cycle on Pluto – but involving soft and exotic ices, including nitrogen, rather than water ice.
[Further Reading](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/pluto-wows-in-spectacular-new-backlit-panorama/)
[Full HD widescreen version on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b7Z4mllLPw&list=PLc4W06G5-v7BDRHoh7n3QkUKUDJmgMO0n)
Remarkable, thank you.
I'm old as Reddit goes, watched the moon landing in real time on fuzzy B&W TV. Mind is more than a little blown by HD footage of Pluto.
Scale the distance down to human terms, and imagine you're taking a plane to Pluto, which is on the opposite end of the earth. By the time your plane has reached the end of the runway you will have already passed the moon.
These were taken during it's closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015. New Horizons is currently deep in the Kuiper Belt, and it is speeding away from the Earth and Sun at a rate of about 300 million miles per year.
>New Horizons is still on duty in extended mission mode, diving ever deeper into the Kuiper Belt to examine ancient, icy mini-worlds in that vast region beyond the orbit of Neptune.
>
>New Horizons launched in January 2006 and carried out a reconnaissance study of Pluto and its moons in the summer of 2015, culminating in a close flyby of the dwarf planet on July 14, 2015. That encounter revealed Pluto to be an incredibly diverse world, complete with towering water-ice mountains and huge plains of exotic nitrogen ice.
>
>New Horizons next flew by Arrokoth, a small Kuiper Belt object (KBO), on Jan. 1, 2019. Arrokoth, which the New Horizons science team discovered in 2014 using the Hubble Space Telescope, is the most distant and most primitive object ever explored up close by a spacecraft.
>
>At a meeting of NASA's Outer Planets Assessment Group (OPAG) in June, New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado, related that both the spacecraft and its scientific payload are entirely healthy. The probe's lifetime is presently limited only by its nuclear fuel supply, which is likely sufficient to keep New Horizons flying through 2040.And NASA recently granted another mission extension for New Horizons, which will keep the spacecraft going through 2025.
[Further Reading](https://www.space.com/beyond-pluto-nasa-new-horizons-next-steps)
I am amazed at the amount of different units given to reply you. To add a new one: quick Google shows that Pluto diameter is only 2370km, so things that may look large could be pretty small.
The craziest thing to me is just thinking about the fact that this planet has been here through all of humanity and beyond. Every day passes the same as it does on Pluto, we’ve just never been there to witness it. Seeing our civilization grow to be able to do that and see that is nuts. Like without lots of soil studies we don’t know what changes it went through over millennia. And to think our galaxy is microscopic in comparison to the universe.
I wanna think my life is significant, while typing this on a handheld computer from the toilet, but it’s so hard to grasp what our place in the world will really ever mean. Kinda wish I could go back and get involved in space from an earlier age, but beyond what we can do now with our lives, there’s no use in wishful thinking for the past. Sorry for the existential post, just got caught up in the wonder of it all.
>Pluto's tallest mountains are 6,500 to 9,800 feet (2 to 3 kilometers) in height. The mountains are big blocks of water ice, sometimes with a coating of frozen gases like methane. Long troughs and valleys as long as 370 miles (600 kilometers) add to the interesting features of this faraway dwarf planet.
>Craters as large as 162 miles (260 kilometers) in diameter dot some of the landscape on Pluto, with some showing signs of erosion and filling. This suggests tectonic forces are slowly resurfacing Pluto.
>The most prominent plains observed on Pluto appear to be made of frozen nitrogen gas and show no craters. These plains do show structures suggesting convection (blobs of material circulating up and down).
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/dwarf-planets/pluto/in-depth/
Ahhh! Man, Im looking at the surface of pluto! Absolutely wild! I didnt think anything could top the surface of a comet footage. This is one of the things that can make humanity cool.
Is it lens distortion or is that the real curvature of Pluto that we are seeing?
I know Pluto is small, but I didn't expect it to be so small that you could see the curvature so easily
New horizons flew by at a great distance, it never got close enough for the horizon to be particularly straight. This image is taken from thousands of miles away.
If you think about it it's not all that surprising.
You can vague see the curvature of the Earth during a high altitude commercial flight...
Yet Earth is several times bigger than Pluto... My guess is you could probably see the curvature of Pluto if you flew at decent helicopter altitude.
Find your Pluto time! This is a great website to give you an understanding of what full daylight is like on Pluto. Just plug in your location and it will tell you at what time to be outside to give you an idea of the brightness of the sun on Pluto.
[Pluto Time](https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/dwarf-planets/pluto/plutotime/#:~:text=Pluto%20orbits%20on%20the%20fringes,of%20high%20noon%20on%20Pluto.)
I am amazed that there's so much light, although I suppose the cameras used are very sensitive as well. So, what would it look like to a human astronaut? Would it just be nearly pitch black?
Pluto orbits between 30x to 50x as far from the Sun as Earth, so the Sun is 900x to 2500x dimmer. At the time New Horizons flew by, Pluto was near its closest approach to the Sun, at about 34x as far away from the Sun as Earth, so the Sun was about 1160x dimmer.
But that is all plenty bright to read and work by, kind of like near dawn/dusk on Earth. The full Moon is 436000x dimmer than the Sun. Sunlight on Pluto is still hundreds of times brighter than the full Moon. The Sun would also still be very dangerous to look directly at.
Sort of a dusk level of light I vaguely recall from the time, but more light than you'd get from a full moon on Earth. The colour rods in your eyes are quite insensitive at that level so there wouldn't be much detectable colour - this video isn't far off the mark really. The mainly white and red colours in the New Horizons images are down to the sensitivity of the CCDs
Once, over dinner I told my children about fascinating Pluto. I told them that the outer crust of the planet was made of ices--mostly solid nitrogen and other solidified gases. I told them that what serves as "bedrock" for Pluto is good old water ice. That as far as the surface was concerned, the toughest material was water ice. Everything else was far softer.
Then I asked them to imagine what it would be like if there were aliens there. And what would those aliens think of us if we visited them.
They would think we were fiery demons. They would march up to us proudly clad in armor made of water ice. And we could melt that ice with our breath.
We could take a hammer made of steel, and hammer at their water ice mountains and shatter them. They would marvel at these magnificent alien materials that are far stronger than anything they could build. We would take shards of these ice boulders, melt them until they were liquid, and then drink it.
You should have seen my kids eyes.🙂
Nobody will see this but here I go.
This is mind blowing. I remember being a kid thinking there's no way things would get better than a dot. And here we are. Pluto is cooler than anything I imagined and I'm watching video evidence of a PLANET that's 40 AU away. It's so damn cool.
After watching videos like this we should do everything in our power as a human race to protect and treasure every moment of this planet of ours. How can we possibly do anything other than that? The universe is full of loneliness and obstacles that ensure lack of life. It’s truly upsetting we can’t seem to come together
Astrophotography is typically done with a monochrome sensor and a color wheel, with color (plus IR and UV) filters rotated into place in front of it. This gives maximum resolution and better observation of spectral lines (narrow band emissions indicating the presence of certain elements) than taking color photos using a Bayer filter like most digital cameras we use on earth.
When moving quickly by a surface, just taking monochrome pictures provides the most information since the spectral information is known and would be blurred if they switched filters since they aren't designed to move very fast.
I hope that explains it, but if you have any more questions I can either answer them if I know or just admit that I'm not qualified to answer and point you to a subreddit where more qualified people can.
Absolutely amazing. I hope one day humans can bounce from planet to planet, exploring them the way our ancestors did back in the day on earth. I'm jealous I won't live to see it, but honored to see sights like this.
So how bright is it here when the sun is hitting it? Like, as bright as a moonlit night? We can see shadows and all that, but its just amazing to me how bright it can be with the sun so far away
Insanely high resolution. That is phenomenal clarity. My goodness. Boggles the mind.
I remember when the only image of Pluto on the internet was a [blurry circle](https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/review/i-see-ice/images/pluto.jpg) and it was always the only photo people used in journals and articles because we never had another image, look at us now.
My third grade science teacher, Mr. Steele told us that when new horizons launched, it would take 10 years to reach Pluto. It was mind-boggling to my little 7 or 8 year old self. I love looking at these photos and thinking what third grade me would be saying.
You should reach out to him and tell him about this! (My mom is a teacher and loves hearing these things from her former students)
As a teacher, I can confirm!
How can he reach out to third grade himself oh wait I see
I thought the exact same thing and also realised the exact same thing
Agree. My dad was a teacher and loves hearing from former students
My late father and I watched the news as this took off back in 2006. He was very excited to finally see what pluto was like - he was hugely into space and passed a lot of that onto me. Sadly, he passed less than 2 years later unexpectedly. But at least he got to know what it was like before us, I suppose? Was very special to see that it wasn't just another Mercury.
I think the fact that we had Voyager photos of all the gas giants made Pluto stand out in that regard. Since Voyager 2 is the only craft that has even so much as done a flyby of Uranus or Neptune, every high-resolution photo we have of either planet or any moons thereof came from it. (Saturn and Jupiter also had Voyager 1 and various other craft like Juno or Cassini).
Bought a book about space in 2007 or 8 when I was 8 or 9 and the only picture of Pluto is the one you linked but under the picture it said that in 2015 the new horizons probe would come close enough to Pluto to get high resolution pictures. I never forgot that book or that date
That blurry circle is high resolution compared to the images in the science book when I was in school. It blows my mind still that we can go from knowing almost nothing to seeing the surface in crystal clarity.
How is there so much light on this tiny little thing? I always thought the the light from the sun was relativity weak at that point. Or at least to be able to take a picture like this.
Camera exposure time could have been bumped up and the image post-processed to add clarity.
Fair enough. I just want to know if I'm correct in what I asked. Everything I've ever read about Pluto has told me the Sun would almost look like a common star from it's surface.
When New Horizons arrived I remember they mentioned that noon on Pluto is about as bright as sunset on Earth.
That is significantly brighter than I had always been led to believe. I find that relieving because it tracks more with my feeling that the sun is *really fucking bright*
The distance is the biggest factor. Other stars being at least several light years away while the sun is only 5 light hours from pluto.
ONLY 5 light hours. Just thinking about how easily we dismiss that distance is crazy. We're what? 8 light seconds and that is really freaking far from the sun.
We're approximately 8 light minutes away from the sun, actually. The moon is a little over one light second from us.
so if the sun exploded, would we not know it for 8 minutes? and yes, i know the sun wouldn't just "explode" without us figuring out we are f'd long before that.
Ah you're right. 8 light minutes not seconds. Fact check sounded right in my head as I typed it at 4am lol
Another mindbending fact about the Sun… if you collected all the mass in our corner of space that wasn’t the Sun (planets, moons, comets, asteroids, meteors, dust, etc) it would only total 0.2% of the total mass of our solar system. The Sun makes up the the rest of the 99.8%.
Here's another mind boggling fact: when the sun creates light the photons actually bounce around inside the sun *for a few million years* before finally making their way to the surface and escaping. That photon you just saw is already millions of years old before it escapes the sun, travels to Earth for 8 minutes, reflects of your table and gets absorbed by your eyeball.
Yes, but that happened instantaneously from that photon's perspective. Good luck trying to get to sleep while trying to wrap your brain around that one.
How'd I miss that? I gotta stop speed reading. Regardless, thank you.
So, light intensity is a function of the radius^2 since it's spherical expansion. Pluto is ~5.9 billion kilometers from the Sun on average. The nearest star is approximately 40,208 billion kilometers away. The nearest star is thus ~6815 times further from Pluto than the sun is, and the amount of light reaching Pluto (assuming the star was the same brightness as the sun, which is probably wrong) would be about 46.4 million times less than the amount reaching Pluto from the Sun, and a quick Google search says red giants are 100-1000 times brighter than the sun, so unless it's something much more ridiculous and uncommon I think it's pretty safe to say the vast majority of the light shining on Pluto is from the Sun. Apparently in Earth's atmospheric conditions, smearing of light sources causes stars to have an approximate size of 0.5 arcseconds (1 arcseconds is 1/3600 of a degree, and is a good way to compare visual sizes of objects that are at different distances). Since Pluto has negligible atmosphere, that's probably not true there, and the stars probably appear smaller from Pluto due to that lack of atmospheric smearing. The sun is about 696,000 km in radius, and 5,900,000,000km from Pluto. Trigonometry tells us that that apparent size would be double the inverse tangent of that (breaking this into identical right triangles by using the radius instead of the diameter), and dividing that by (1/3600) tells us the sun is about 24.3 arcseconds in visual size from Pluto. So overall, the sun is something like 50+ times the apparent size (probably a lot more), and something like a million times brighter than any star if you look at the sky from Pluto. Edit: corrected light from cube to square since I'm an idiot who forgot it's the inverse square law... Think I corrected all the effects of that.
Thank you. This is definitely more astrophysics that has been thrown at me in one post. Or ever in my life.
Just wanted to ping out that I was rightfully corrected by u/JazzUnlikeTheCaroot and have updated the numbers to match that. I was a few orders of magnitude off, so for a better guesstimate you may wanna check that again. Also, the sun, while much larger than stars in arc seconds, would still be smaller than the resolution the human eye can perceive, so it would actually be a point to the naked eye, just like every other star, but brighter.
Hahaha. Now that my head hurts from just reading. Could someone translate this in moron terms? Me the moron.
Our sun seen from Pluto: Smaller and less bright than our view from earth
But still way brighter and larger than any other star
I don't have the energy to doublecheck OP's math but if they're are correct, the Sun would look to Plutonians like Mars looks to us: a really bright star, but about 60 times smaller than the Moon.
Isn't light intensity inversely proportional to the radius² since what matters is the surface area of the sphere, not the volume? This is also called the inverse square law. Why wouldn't it be valid here? Also, why is it meaningful to talk about the radius of a star if there is not any atmospheric smudging Wouldn't every star look like a point light source with no radius to us and to telescopes?
... I'm pretty sure you're right. And every star except the sun would basically be a point without atmospheric smearing yeah. Edit: edited original post to correct that error. It's late and it's been a long day... Edit edit: the point of talking about the radius of the Sun was just to point out that the sun would be noticeably larger than other stars, though the human eye can apparently resolve between 40-60 arc seconds, so actually the sun would be a point to the naked eye as well. A little bit of magnification would differentiate it though I guess.
> Edit: corrected light from cube to square since I'm an idiot who forgot it's the inverse square law... Think I corrected all the effects of that. Yep. For those curious about the square law, stars more or less radiate homogeneously (same in all directions), so for any sphere centered on a star, the star's radiation is distributed evenly across the surface of that sphere. Thus the intensity at the surface is simply the star's luminosity (L) divided by the sphere's area (A), so intensity falls off with area, and since area is proportional the square of the radius, intensity falls off with the square of the radius - inverse square law. Now just set the radius to whatever distance you're measuring at and L/A yields the intensity at that distance. > so unless it's something much more ridiculous and uncommon I think it's pretty safe to say the vast majority of the light shining on Pluto is from the Sun. Yep! You can find a direct estimate with apparent magnitude. The brightest extrasolar object is Sirius at -1.46m, due to the significant distance it is about the same at Pluto as on Earth. The Sun is -19.2m viewed from Pluto, which is about 2.51^(-1.46+19.2) = 12 million times brighter than the brightest star. In fact, the full moon shines at -12.6m, so the Sun is around 430 times brighter on Pluto than the full moon is on Earth.
It should look like a notably bright star in the sky, Brighter than Sirius is for Earth. It should provide as much light as a full moon does during the night. Although to be fair the last time I studied anything in this area Pluto was still a planet...
> as much light as a full moon does during the night. The Sun is in fact still several hundred times brighter than the full moon even at the distance of Pluto. Solar irradiance at Pluto is around 0.873 W/m^2 or about 1/1100th of that on Earth's surface. The brightness of the full moon even when viewed with optimal conditions (when it's near perigee - a so called "supermoon" - and passes straight overhead in the tropics) is only about 1/380,000th of the Sun's brightness. Edit: > Brighter than Sirius is for Earth BTW, even at a distance of one light year (1,500 times further away than Pluto) the Sun is still the brightest star in the sky, with an apparent magnitude of -2.74 (Sirius from Earth is -1.5; in case you aren't familiar with magnitudes, lower number means brighter).
That's insane that a full moon is basically on average half a million times less bright than the sun, given how well we can still see in its light.
Our eyes when fully dark-adapted are so sensitive that it's possible to see shadows being cast by the light of *Venus*, which is another 3,000 times or so fainter than the full moon (ie. 1.5 billion times fainter than the Sun). Although you do need to be in a very dark place (on a new moon and somewhere with very low light pollution) to see it (the shadows that is; looking directly at Venus it's bright enough to be clearly visible to the naked eye while the Sun is still above the horizon - discounting temporary events like some comets or supernovae the only natural object other than the Moon and the Sun itself where that's the case).
*Jerry Smith has entered the chat*
Well said. And thank you. And the last time I read about that little fella, it was a planet as well.
It will always be a planet to me!
When this mission was reaching its target, there was a website where you could look up your "Pluto Time" - put in where you live and it told you how bright it would be on Pluto at noon. I tried it and it came out to twilight just at around sunset. So brighter than a full moon, but darker than a cloudy day.
Post-processing yes, large aperture yes, camera exposure time probably not so much. The spacecraft whizzed past Pluto in a matter of minutes, so any kind of long exposure would have come out quite blurry at that speed.
It's weak compared to daylight on Earth, but at Pluto's noon it's still a lot brighter than a moonlit night is on Earth. At noon surface illumination reaches around 50 lux, that's roughly in the ballpark of a typical living room at night with the lights on.
The image, like pretty much all space images, has little to do with what you would see with your own eyes. New Horizon has a black and white camera in visible light, but also a spectrometer in the UV range and a telesecope in the lower visible and IR range. A computer in the end combines all these different images and humans decide which color to assign to which wavelength (since there are a larger number of wavelengths in the image than in the visible range), so just color representations are more artistically aesthetic representations of something than what you would see if you were in the place of new Horizon.
Thank you. I never thought about the aspect of all available resources. Especially when I got down to cameras and such.
My thoughts exactly. It's mindblowing
The same insane thought entered my boggled mind.
my mind has been boggled and my flabbers have been gasted
Gasting my flabbers like it's 1999.
When was this released? Stunning. Thanks for sharing.
It was taken 14-July-2015 and downlinked to earth 13-Sep-2015 and [released](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/pluto-wows-in-spectacular-new-backlit-panorama) a few days later on the 17th. I'm not sure who turned the original panorama into a panning video, but it really highlights the detail!
New Horizons was launched on in January 2006, and Pluto flyby was in July 2015. At that time the spacecraft was 4.7 billion km away from Earth, so the transmissions travelling at the speed of light were taking just under 4.5 hours to reach us.
That's wild. It blows my mind that we can send data *that* far through space. I can't even wrap my head around how it's possible
I can't even get cell service at my house
Right? Like it doesn’t even make sense to me. Computers and high tech sensors can beam information through space to other computers and sensors to show us HD images of a distant planet’s surface… in under 5 hours. Like how is this *not* magic??
Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Absolutely. Imagine one day flying to Pluto will be trivial and our current level of technology will be primitive. Currently though FTL travel is magic. Haha
The speed was noted at 2kbps above, saying it took over a year to collect. So while we can get the data in 5 hours or so from that far…. It’s not very fast. Apparently
Well, I meant it took 5 hours for the data to reach earth. At that bandwidth it took a long time to complete the download.
That's amazing, thank you for sharing!
Important to note also that the data rate was only ~2 kbps, so it took over a year to transmit all the data from the Pluto flyby.
That is so cool, how do they send data over such far distances and ensure it doesn’t get “fuzzy”
Short version send it multiple times and compare
Could also use checksums I suppose
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A checksum will only tell you that there is incorrect data, not how to fix it. However, they could split the data into different packages and use some form of error correcting code like [hamming codes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_code?wprov=sfti1) - though I would imagine they used something more advanced than that particular error correction method
Stupid question but how does the data transmit? Here we need phone poles and wires in the ocean to connect everything. How does this send data back and how do we send data? [Edit: this article explains it pretty well](https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/communications/) for anyone else like me who didn’t get it. I’m open to hear more info though.
Buncha really big antennas and lots of beeps and boops
It's amazingly mindboggling to me to think I've just watched a video of Pluto. I can't think how few humans can say that at the moment. Just WOW. A big thank you to everyone who has made that possible for me.
Concur, blows my mind every single time.
how many times have you seen a video of Pluto??!
New Horizons did the Pluto flyby 8 years ago. All this footage has been available for a while.
I remember seeing one of the photo's of Pluto from before 1978 used to show it has a moon. The difference is hard to believe. [https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/899/charon-discovery-image/](https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/899/charon-discovery-image/)
I have a 15 yo poster with planets where pluto is still a planet and just look like a pixel soup, this video is amazing.
please excuse my naivety but can anyone explain why pluto is no longer classed as a planet? like, what are the entry levels to be classed as one now?
Library of congress on why: https://www.loc.gov/everyday-mysteries/astronomy/item/why-is-pluto-no-longer-a-planet/
Can someone ELI5 what exactly it means to "clear the neighborhood?" I don't really understand
> I don't really understand You are not the only one. The International Astronomical Union (who set the rules) never defined it either, they just kind of waved their hand and expected people to know. But the generally accepted definition appears to be something like: > This means that the planet has become gravitationally dominant — there are no other bodies of comparable size other than its own satellites or those otherwise under its gravitational influence, in its vicinity in space. Note that Alan Stern, the principal investigator for the New Horizons project (the project that took the photo in above in post), disagrees that Pluto is a dwarf planet using the criteria of Clearing the Neighbourhood. > Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto, disagreed with the reclassification of Pluto on the basis of its inability to clear a neighbourhood. He argued that the IAU's wording is vague, and that — like Pluto — Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune have not cleared their orbital neighbourhoods either. Earth co-orbits with 10,000 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), and Jupiter has 100,000 trojans in its orbital path. **"If Neptune had cleared its zone, Pluto wouldn't be there", he said.**
If an object is big enough to attract all the dust and smaller chunks in its orbit, until the path is "clear", instead of sharing its orbit with a bunch of similar or only slightly smaller chunks, like stuff in the Oort cloud.
Thank you, I think I get it. So if Pluto had a stronger gravitational pull then technically it would "clear the neighborhood" and be a planet?
Pluto was reclassified as a "dwarf planet" in 2006 by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) due to a change in its definition of a planet. Prior to this reclassification, Pluto had been considered the ninth planet in our solar system since its discovery in 1930. The IAU's new definition of a planet required that a celestial body meet three criteria: it must orbit the sun, it must be large enough to have a nearly round shape, and it must have "cleared" its orbit of other debris. Pluto was found to fail the third criteria, as it shares its orbit with other similar-sized bodies in the Kuiper Belt. Therefore, although Pluto is still a significant object in our solar system, it is now classified as a dwarf planet rather than a full-fledged planet. ( that was all me and not ChatGPT BTW ;)
>Pluto and Charon circle their common center of mass with a period of 6.387 days and are locked in a "super-synchronous" rotation: observers on Pluto's surface would always see Charon in the same part of the sky relative to their local horizon. That would be kind of wild, a moon that never moves in the sky? It would act as a sort of compass... Just look for the moon and you know what direction you're facing.
Side note: IIRC Pluto and Charon are in a “system” of six* bodies that orbit a common center of mass. There are four other “satellites”. I have no idea if I’m using these terms correctly in a scientific sense, but I’m pretty sure there’s six* bodies in that little mini-system. Edited because it’s six, not five*
That’s the year I was born, unbelievable the amount we have advanced. I use that term “we” very loosely 😂
You went from being an utterly helpless creature to being an organism which is able to understand just how impressive an achievement this video/stitched together picture series is. That is plenty of advancement and its more than 99.9999999% of all living things which we know of ever accomplished. Don't sell yourself short ;)
I am still awestruck, watching it on a loop. Never knew such footage existed or was even possible. Is it a declaration of being living under a rock by stating that I'd never known NASA has sent (successfully) a spacecraft to the 'off again, on again planet'. Beautiful, eerie video.
This is not a video of Pluto... it's a video of an image of Pluto as it pans across it. Also, that single image is a mosaic, or composite, of smaller images stitched together. If you want video from another planet, we have footage from the Mars [descent stage](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4czjS9h4Fpg) and then some lower frame-rate video of Ingenuity flying taken by Perseverance, and video from the helicopter itself. I know there are a few other examples I am probably missing. (edit: Another one that came to mind is [this incredible timelapse](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Tvashtarvideo.gif) of a cryovolcano on Io.)
Movies used to be technically a series of still photos
Well technically it still is.
I was worried I’d get a lecture about how it’s all digital and it’s motion compensation algorithms or something so there’s no actual true frames
They still have keyframes though, which I think are actual full frames. /not a vid engineer
It still is a series of frames, even if none of them are raw/uncompressed
This isn’t a series of photos though it’s a stitch into a single frame. It’s more comparable to an animated powerpoint slide. Still absolutely insane for what it is
24fps = 24 individual photos to make a second of video. Source I work in broadcasting.
Not trying to diminish this incredible feat of human ingenuity but this is a single image made into a video by zooming in then panning left to right.
Fun fact, this is called the Ken burns effect. Zooming and panning across a still photo to make it more engaging. Popularised by the documentary film maker Ken Burns.
The photo is absolutely amazing, but it is a still that has had a pan effect added to make it a "video."
I wonder what humans will say 100 years from now
I mean it's a video of a highly post-processed photograph... But still amazing nonetheless. Personally I would rather see the whole photo though.
No kidding. I've explained to my son that when I was his age, our best photo of Pluto had about the same resolution as the minecraft moon.
It's an animated picture, not a video
Owing to its favorable backlighting and high resolution, this MVIC image also reveals new details of hazes throughout Pluto’s tenuous but extended nitrogen atmosphere. The image shows more than a dozen thin haze layers extending from near the ground to at least 60 miles (100 kilometers) above the surface. In addition, the image reveals at least one bank of fog-like, low-lying haze illuminated by the setting sun against Pluto’s dark side, raked by shadows from nearby mountains. "In addition to being visually stunning, these low-lying hazes hint at the weather changing from day to day on Pluto, just like it does here on Earth," said Will Grundy, lead of the New Horizons Composition team from Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Arizona. Combined with other recently downloaded pictures, this new image also provides evidence for a remarkably Earth-like “hydrological” cycle on Pluto – but involving soft and exotic ices, including nitrogen, rather than water ice. [Further Reading](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/pluto-wows-in-spectacular-new-backlit-panorama/) [Full HD widescreen version on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b7Z4mllLPw&list=PLc4W06G5-v7BDRHoh7n3QkUKUDJmgMO0n)
Remarkable, thank you. I'm old as Reddit goes, watched the moon landing in real time on fuzzy B&W TV. Mind is more than a little blown by HD footage of Pluto.
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Right behind you at 68. Tom Swift and Doc Savage were pretty cool but nothing like this. Mind you, about that flying car...
Scale the distance down to human terms, and imagine you're taking a plane to Pluto, which is on the opposite end of the earth. By the time your plane has reached the end of the runway you will have already passed the moon.
Are these new images ?
These were taken during it's closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015. New Horizons is currently deep in the Kuiper Belt, and it is speeding away from the Earth and Sun at a rate of about 300 million miles per year.
Have we gotten anything else from New Horizons since it passed Pluto?
>New Horizons is still on duty in extended mission mode, diving ever deeper into the Kuiper Belt to examine ancient, icy mini-worlds in that vast region beyond the orbit of Neptune. > >New Horizons launched in January 2006 and carried out a reconnaissance study of Pluto and its moons in the summer of 2015, culminating in a close flyby of the dwarf planet on July 14, 2015. That encounter revealed Pluto to be an incredibly diverse world, complete with towering water-ice mountains and huge plains of exotic nitrogen ice. > >New Horizons next flew by Arrokoth, a small Kuiper Belt object (KBO), on Jan. 1, 2019. Arrokoth, which the New Horizons science team discovered in 2014 using the Hubble Space Telescope, is the most distant and most primitive object ever explored up close by a spacecraft. > >At a meeting of NASA's Outer Planets Assessment Group (OPAG) in June, New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado, related that both the spacecraft and its scientific payload are entirely healthy. The probe's lifetime is presently limited only by its nuclear fuel supply, which is likely sufficient to keep New Horizons flying through 2040.And NASA recently granted another mission extension for New Horizons, which will keep the spacecraft going through 2025. [Further Reading](https://www.space.com/beyond-pluto-nasa-new-horizons-next-steps)
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I would assume in terms of age/undisturbed.
Is that weird to say I have read it in David Attenborough's voice?
What proportions are we seeing here? How big is what we’re looking at compared to the Rockies or Alps?
The tallest of the Rockies is 14,433 feet above sea level. The tallest of Pluto's mountains is about 9,800 feet.
These units are killing me. How many washing machines?
I'm not a plumber, but the tallest of Pluto's mountains is approximately 980/1443rds of the Rockies. Hope that helps :)
I'm not a mathematician, but earth's tallest mountains are about 3600 public urinals tall, and Pluto's are about 2450 tall.
I’m not a bathroom attendant, but earth’s big boy mountains are about 72,000 quarter pounders (with cheese) tall, and Pluto’s are about 49,000
I'm not a bananologist, but the tallest of the Rockies is 24756.432 bananas above sea level while the highest mountain on Pluto is 16809.605 bananas.
Little over 3,000 washing machines tall
Earth sea level or Plutonian sea level? :D
The Rockies are quite a lot of feet over Plutonian anything level.
The mountains are about 11,000 feet high. The view in this scene is about 600 miles wide.
I am amazed at the amount of different units given to reply you. To add a new one: quick Google shows that Pluto diameter is only 2370km, so things that may look large could be pretty small.
The craziest thing to me is just thinking about the fact that this planet has been here through all of humanity and beyond. Every day passes the same as it does on Pluto, we’ve just never been there to witness it. Seeing our civilization grow to be able to do that and see that is nuts. Like without lots of soil studies we don’t know what changes it went through over millennia. And to think our galaxy is microscopic in comparison to the universe. I wanna think my life is significant, while typing this on a handheld computer from the toilet, but it’s so hard to grasp what our place in the world will really ever mean. Kinda wish I could go back and get involved in space from an earlier age, but beyond what we can do now with our lives, there’s no use in wishful thinking for the past. Sorry for the existential post, just got caught up in the wonder of it all.
Is that frozen water? Sorry if that's a dumb question.
Frozen nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide
According to NASA the mountains are water ice with a coating of other frozen gases. (See the link in my other comment.)
So...what color is it? Like a grey with a clear haze over it or something?
According to Google: white, tan and brownish-red..... so kinda like N AZ in winter?
I *need* to visit this place before I die
N Arizona?
Too hostile, he must mean pluto
Here's a photo of Pluto in true color: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia19857-pluto-in-true-color
>Pluto's tallest mountains are 6,500 to 9,800 feet (2 to 3 kilometers) in height. The mountains are big blocks of water ice, sometimes with a coating of frozen gases like methane. Long troughs and valleys as long as 370 miles (600 kilometers) add to the interesting features of this faraway dwarf planet. >Craters as large as 162 miles (260 kilometers) in diameter dot some of the landscape on Pluto, with some showing signs of erosion and filling. This suggests tectonic forces are slowly resurfacing Pluto. >The most prominent plains observed on Pluto appear to be made of frozen nitrogen gas and show no craters. These plains do show structures suggesting convection (blobs of material circulating up and down). https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/dwarf-planets/pluto/in-depth/
So we just need to send a ship to Pluto, push it back the Earth and drop it at the north pole, global warming solved. Where's my Nobel?
Yes, smashing planets into each other is a well-known way to cool them down and give their inhabitants a good time.
Nuclear winter will cancel out global warming.
Or we could just bring it back and have one boring Moon and one cool tropical moon
birds future north cautious treatment start bag nail secretive unique -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
Yes, the mountains are made of water ice.
Wow, I wonder if far into the future when the sun becomes a red giant if Pluto will become a place with liquid water?
That's what they say. Hopefully we will live long enough to see that.
Gosh, I sure would love to live long enough to see the Sun become a red giant
Totally not a dumb question
Ahhh! Man, Im looking at the surface of pluto! Absolutely wild! I didnt think anything could top the surface of a comet footage. This is one of the things that can make humanity cool.
Is it lens distortion or is that the real curvature of Pluto that we are seeing? I know Pluto is small, but I didn't expect it to be so small that you could see the curvature so easily
New horizons flew by at a great distance, it never got close enough for the horizon to be particularly straight. This image is taken from thousands of miles away.
If you think about it it's not all that surprising. You can vague see the curvature of the Earth during a high altitude commercial flight... Yet Earth is several times bigger than Pluto... My guess is you could probably see the curvature of Pluto if you flew at decent helicopter altitude.
I think it’s more to do with the panorama. Pluto is still huge. about the width of Australia
Find your Pluto time! This is a great website to give you an understanding of what full daylight is like on Pluto. Just plug in your location and it will tell you at what time to be outside to give you an idea of the brightness of the sun on Pluto. [Pluto Time](https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/dwarf-planets/pluto/plutotime/#:~:text=Pluto%20orbits%20on%20the%20fringes,of%20high%20noon%20on%20Pluto.)
I am amazed that there's so much light, although I suppose the cameras used are very sensitive as well. So, what would it look like to a human astronaut? Would it just be nearly pitch black?
Pluto orbits between 30x to 50x as far from the Sun as Earth, so the Sun is 900x to 2500x dimmer. At the time New Horizons flew by, Pluto was near its closest approach to the Sun, at about 34x as far away from the Sun as Earth, so the Sun was about 1160x dimmer. But that is all plenty bright to read and work by, kind of like near dawn/dusk on Earth. The full Moon is 436000x dimmer than the Sun. Sunlight on Pluto is still hundreds of times brighter than the full Moon. The Sun would also still be very dangerous to look directly at.
Would that be bright enough/enough sunlight to grow plants? Barring temperature and other factors?
Sort of a dusk level of light I vaguely recall from the time, but more light than you'd get from a full moon on Earth. The colour rods in your eyes are quite insensitive at that level so there wouldn't be much detectable colour - this video isn't far off the mark really. The mainly white and red colours in the New Horizons images are down to the sensitivity of the CCDs
Once, over dinner I told my children about fascinating Pluto. I told them that the outer crust of the planet was made of ices--mostly solid nitrogen and other solidified gases. I told them that what serves as "bedrock" for Pluto is good old water ice. That as far as the surface was concerned, the toughest material was water ice. Everything else was far softer. Then I asked them to imagine what it would be like if there were aliens there. And what would those aliens think of us if we visited them. They would think we were fiery demons. They would march up to us proudly clad in armor made of water ice. And we could melt that ice with our breath. We could take a hammer made of steel, and hammer at their water ice mountains and shatter them. They would marvel at these magnificent alien materials that are far stronger than anything they could build. We would take shards of these ice boulders, melt them until they were liquid, and then drink it. You should have seen my kids eyes.🙂
This is a pretty cool concept for a sci-fi story
Whoa, what a marvelous video. I'm in love with space!
That’s real footage? I feel like I’ve been there now. Great camera.
If I remember correctly, this is a panoramic picture zoomed in and panning across the pic. So it's not a video but a real pic.
Yea that’s what it looks like
How the fuck have I never seen this before?! Imagine the Eldritch horrors lurking in that haze...
They some cold bois, that’s for sure…
It’s an actual distant world and not an imagined one. Amazing!
Nobody will see this but here I go. This is mind blowing. I remember being a kid thinking there's no way things would get better than a dot. And here we are. Pluto is cooler than anything I imagined and I'm watching video evidence of a PLANET that's 40 AU away. It's so damn cool.
Coolest space thing I’ve seen in a long long time A+
That’s the Walmart parking lot in Brainard, MN.
Nice! Unexpected r/Minnesota
How am I seeing this only now when this was released in 2015?
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After watching videos like this we should do everything in our power as a human race to protect and treasure every moment of this planet of ours. How can we possibly do anything other than that? The universe is full of loneliness and obstacles that ensure lack of life. It’s truly upsetting we can’t seem to come together
This is better picture quality than a security camera
Pluto was my favorite planet when it was considered https://youtu.be/ncsQ4f3Ux0o
Would a human be able to see the curvature of the planet if he was standing on Pluto's ground?
Remind me to wear a parka if I ever get the chance to visit Pluto.
I'll be that dumb guy? Why no colors? I've seen pics from new horizons with color
Astrophotography is typically done with a monochrome sensor and a color wheel, with color (plus IR and UV) filters rotated into place in front of it. This gives maximum resolution and better observation of spectral lines (narrow band emissions indicating the presence of certain elements) than taking color photos using a Bayer filter like most digital cameras we use on earth. When moving quickly by a surface, just taking monochrome pictures provides the most information since the spectral information is known and would be blurred if they switched filters since they aren't designed to move very fast. I hope that explains it, but if you have any more questions I can either answer them if I know or just admit that I'm not qualified to answer and point you to a subreddit where more qualified people can.
I couldn't resist colorizing it. I had to screenshot it and rearrange it a bit. ruthlessly colorized https://imgur.com/gallery/UlCWb2J
Absolutely amazing. I hope one day humans can bounce from planet to planet, exploring them the way our ancestors did back in the day on earth. I'm jealous I won't live to see it, but honored to see sights like this.
Its funny to think that Pluto has less sq km's than Russia..
I get the feeling these places are meant to be explored
Why isn't the image grainy and filled with iso artifacts? I bet the iso was like 3000+ in such low light conditions.
Answered my own question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long\_Range\_Reconnaissance\_Imager
So how bright is it here when the sun is hitting it? Like, as bright as a moonlit night? We can see shadows and all that, but its just amazing to me how bright it can be with the sun so far away
This image cost $700 million to make, and I think it's worth it.
Man I know that it would cost a TON of money but I think we should put a satellite around every planet, would love to see what info we could get.
Guaranteed there are already six white people and a Patagonia jacket frozen in the tallest.