Iggy Makarevich

New Horizons’ Best View of Pluto’s Craters, Mountains and Icy Plains
NASA.gov Video
Published on Dec 4, 2015
This movie is composed of the sharpest views of Pluto that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft obtained during its flyby on July 14, 2015. The pictures are part of a sequence taken near New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, with resolutions of about 250-280 feet (77-85 meters) per pixel – revealing features smaller than half a city block on Pluto’s diverse surface. The images include a wide variety of cratered, mountainous and glacial terrains – giving scientists and the public alike a super-high resolution view of Pluto’s complexity.

Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

BRAVO to everyone involved in making the ability for this vid to exist a reality. See now, THAT’S Rocket Science! Really, thank you.

Nerds are awesome. Boffins, too. Ja, mon!

‘K, sorry, I’m ok now. Anyway, I stand firmly by my considered assertion that the farther out you go the weirder it gets.

And that suits me just fine.

Here is the photo featured in the video. It is stunning. Oddly, looking at it actually brought out the Fortean curmudgeon in me, bringing a smile closely related to one of my pet peeves.

Nice huh?

Over at ATS, where I am terminally logged in, member gortex said

This stunning picture was released today showing Pluto’s icy crust and the Sputnik Planum’s flats in unprecedented detail , not bad for something 4.67 billion miles away.

That made me think of all those wide-eyed folks who ceaselessly complain of the notorious NASA “low-res” cameras. It’s especially common regarding Mars pictures. Well, there are a lot more of them available. Anyway, I see it a lot and it eally makes me wonder. About people.

Look at the detail there even just above this line at the bottom of the picture. It isn’t enhanced, it just is.

I think the resolution is phenomenal.

The rover cameras as well, are nice, especially the new guy. Some of those hills are quite far away.

I was seriously impressed with the main Curiosity camera and son, it takes a lot to do that. I am jaded to the max. Been looking a lot over the years. These rovers have indeed found some fascinating things. For some reason the media only cover the paredolia-based items. Some of whichare pretty entertaining.

Since I am a bit ranty now for some reason, my biggest peee is that there are never any microphones on rovers. Not just ours, either, Vlad. Seriously. It has an atmosphere. Not a lot of one, but there is one. So—there’s sound.

Let’s hear it, yo!

Even at retail prices it’d be what, a few thou? For off-the-shelf existing science-grade pro audio pieces. American, even. Madonne.

Ah, well, on this imagery, it is good for me even just to think that, “Heck, we can really DO that!”

Okay, thanks for reading.

Peace.