JGoldader-- The faux stamp is awesome! May I use this in social media?

As for me I appropriated the image of Aldebaran for that purpose. =)

That's (very likely) due to oversampling and high albedo variation.
To discern these effects from real deviations from a spherical shape, we'll need images from closer-up.
Nevertheless Pluto may be heavily cratered; can't wait to see what these features actually are.

I would be honored, sir! Glad to give back a little. I got to see Pluto through the UH 2.2m with Dave Tholen back in grad school; now that little dot is becoming a real place, thanks to you and your team. -Jeff

Thanks Jeff!

Just for the record... I have tried reprojecting the latest three images to make a cylindrical projection map, but I can't get a consistent result. The bright spots don't combine as I would expect. I don't know where the problem is right now. There might be issues with limb brightening and deconvolution that are complicating matters. I hope the science team will put something out so I can see what i am doing wrong.

Phil

This is not too surprising- as we noted in the release, we are not confident of the reality of the finest details in these images (deconvolution can do funny things). Fortunately all will be clear very soon!

John

<deleted> - John provided a better answer...

Thanks, John. So, folks, don't go overboard on the interpretations just yet. Wait - is that a gully?

Phil

Left : Hubble (longitude 120°)
Right : NH (longitude 125°)

is a detailed timeline of the observations at closest approach available somewhere? with times of the occultations and such? I have only found this "playbook" for LORRI and MVIC

No obstacles found for NH (rings, little moons...)

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-A...campaign=buffer

Best I can offer is our New Horizons module for Eyes on the Solar System ( http://eyes.nasa.gov/pluto ) - we have the play by play by means of a predicted simulation.

NASA to Hold Media Call to Discuss Surprising Observations of Pluto’s Moons
http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-to-...-pluto-s-moons/

"NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, June 3, to discuss the Hubble Space Telescope's surprising observations of how Pluto's moons behave, and how these new discoveries are being used in the planning for the New Horizons Pluto flyby in July."

So they are misbehaving? Releasing gas, dust? Irregular rotation or orbits?

Feel free.

The masses of Pluto's minor moons are highly uncertain. If one or more were appreciably more or less massive than expected, it could affect its siblings' motions in an unexpected way. My guess is that HST observations have found that there's more (or much less) perturbation than expected between them due to the mass of one or more of them being outside the expected range.

Additionally, the system is full of near-resonances. This could potentially create complex or chaotic long-term dynamics between them even if the masses were about as expected.

Here are updated versions of the satellite montages I posted two days ago. In addition to new Pluto images I added Europa and Callisto. It seems to me that the resampling of the newly released Pluto images might be different from the resampling in the previous release. I haven't updated the resampling of the satellite images to account for this but still this is an interesting comparison. First a version where all of these bodies look bright:

Click to view attachment

And then a version where I have attempted to correct for the albedo. This is only approximate but should be fairly fairly realistic:

Click to view attachment

An idea could be trying deconvolution / sr directly on a spherical model, instead of individual 2d stacks. But I'm almost sure, that New Horizons will acquire better images much faster than I could write an according sw. After a first glance at the jpg compression artifacts I knew it would be easier just to wait a few days. Deconvolving compression artifacts ... I've never tried before.

I see there are reports of a possible sixth moon, half as bright as Styx on Space News, but I think it could have been a misquote.

From Space News:
http://www.space.com/29513-pluto-moons-rin...ons-photos.html




However, from Space Daily:


Ouch! A little different I think they are both trying to say that any satellites about half the brightness of Styx ought to be detectable at this range if they existed.

Just go straight to the source:



They've got an upper limit on the sizes of any undiscovered moons (as well as rings).

Add to the end of the first quote "--if one were there. But it wasn't"

Yes even though english isn't my first language, even I jumped at how they had phrased it there. No reason to add more fuel to the fire where 'some' do their best misinterpreting every result or image.

The preceeding paragraph is quite clear:

without use of the ambiguous meaning of the word "could".

By stacking 2x48 images I would have been surprised not to find even a tiny hint to a ring, if it would have been obvious, even with the jpegs.
But it's something else to confirm a moon than to find a new one, particularly if it's outside the orbital plane of Charon, or if its orbit is very eccentric.

I think this is the most excited I've been in quite some time. Pluto promises exciting new discoveries. Close encounter is a week or so after my birthday, What a gift!

same here. I planned to take some vacation and disconnect from the internet, cellphones and wifi during July, but then I realized I've been waiting to see Pluto ever since I heard of the Pluto Fast Flyby proposal almost 25 years ago and I changed of plans.
I didn't do it neither for Curiosity landing (I was somewhere in the Gobi desert at the time) nor for Rosetta's arrival (I was somewhere in central Asia)

(This post is still about images before 2015-05-15.)

Full 1x1-binned images of the LORRI map series have been provided in sets of four (quadruples).
In contrast to the 4x4-binned images, those aren't aligned (fortunately just translated), and may show CRs or stars of variable brightness. Here a version with cross hairs indicating the spots above some brightenss trigger level, animated over one of these quadruples:

These fluctuations, together with lack of much background features, make automated and sufficiently fast registering a little tricky, but still well-feasible with some effort:

(You may notice no change at all at first glance; that's due to accurate registering.)
This registering is the basis for any further useful processing...
(The medium-term goal is accurate determination of the Pluto and Charon orbits and positions for later surface mapping attempts exploiting mutual tidal locking. This needs some intermediate steps as preparation.)

Too funny not to share it here: http://xkcd.com/1532/

A big batch of new raw images from the 28th to the 30th of May have been released. Pluto is starting to look very big, but the PSF is still dominating (I guess), so there's probably not much to be gained by staring long and hard at them.

From those new images: this is a composite of four frames, enlarged 400%. I can't do fancy-schmancy deconvolution so I'm just playing with Photoshop. Some detail is visible on Pluto even without deconvolution, but a bright limbward rim on the prominent dark spot is absolutely certainly an artifact!

Phil

Click to view attachment

This reveals a relatively dark, narrow feature oriented roughly between the 4 o'clock and 10 o'clock positions - it may have been visible in the earlier set of images as well (I haven't checked the subspacecraft longitude).

What I think is really interesting now is whether deconvolution would start revealing details on Charon. It's going to be very interesting to see what the next set of deconvolved images released by the NH team look like.

Trying to understand Pluto without Charon is like trying to put a puzzle together with only half the pieces. Or with a quarter of the pieces, in accordance with the square-cube law.

That's my cleaned and stacked, cropped, 4x-magnified versions of the 2015-05-28, 2015-05-29, and 2015-05-30 full-frame 1x1-binned quadruples:
Click to view attachment Click to view attachment Click to view attachment
I didn't apply any enhancement or rotational adjustment, just cleaning and stacking by averaging the three most similar pixel values of each of the four registered images within each set.

Probably over did it but I think Pluto is still a bit too far away to make deconvolution all that useful.
Click to view attachment

I always thought Pluto was some sort of weird hound, but it looks more like a Pug in that view!

Phil

This image is obtained by averaging 4-fold magnified and registered versions, both together in a one-step transformation (by bilinear interpolation), of the four 2015-05-30 full-frame 1x1 binned LORRI images. After linear reduction of brightness, excessive sharpening, followed by another 4-fold magnification for better visibility:
Click to view attachment

This is a look at the radius-2 hipass portion of the (4x4-fold supersampled) average image, again another 4-fold magnification for better visibility, and a 16-fold brightness-stretch:
Click to view attachment
From the latter image I'd say, the dark region at the right is well above jpg artifact level, same for the more or less diagonal central darkish area. There may be some additional structuring, but it competes with artifacts.
For Charon I don't see much more than the PSF and artifacts.

For completeness, here a 4-frame animated gif, made of the registered 4-fold magnified (bilinear) and cropped images, before averaging and sharpening:
Click to view attachment

The new LORRI 4x4-binned images seem to consist of at least two series, one with exposure time a little below 3s, summarized as OpNav Campaign 4,
and "footprint" images with exposure a little below 10s, like previous 4x4-binned images.

Starting with OpNav Campaign 4:
The images are now taken in sets of 6, in contrast to sets of 5 as in OpNav Campaign 3.
I've still to adjust to the additional 6th image, so here a preliminary overview with only 5 of each image series, plus the stacked image:

Thus far there are 4 such sets available.
Here an album of the stacked and 4x-magnified images, registered relative to the first.

Two moons (Nix/Hydra) are well-perceivable, Styx and Kerberos not (yet) obvious.

meanwhile, Hubble Finds Two Chaotically Tumbling Pluto Moons
there should be a Nature paper out soon, but I can't find it yet

June 4th issue according to this article: http://www.nature.com/news/pluto-s-moons-m...rony-1.17681#b1

Resonances too.

paper is here: Resonant interactions and chaotic rotation of Pluto’s small moons

Press release renderings of the moons are lovely, but they must surely have some of the shortest usable lifespans of any such images ever made. Reality is fast approaching...

Was anybody able to gets the NASA newsaudio stream to work? All I ever got was the page with a blank/black embedded window, no playback.

Now I have to hope that someone captured it ...

Yeah, time is running short with publishing discoveries near Pluto, before New Horizons will overtake in the next weeks.
Besides this, any a-priori knowledge would be useful for hazard assessment.

...Here an overview of eight series of "footprint" images, all taken on 2015-05-30 within less than an hour:

(using 5 of 6 images of each series due to restrictions of my software, but this should yield useful results already)

All these images should be "stackable" to one image with reasonable "motion blur".
I'll see, whether I can convince my computer to do so.

Was this the subject of today's press release?

http://www.wired.com/2015/06/odd-orbits-de...plutos-mystery/

My computer has been more successful with registering and stacking the images than me with finding a recorded version of the audionews in the same time.

So here an album of registered and stacked "footprint" images.

And the median and mean:

Blink between "Search for sources of hazmat" and 2015-05-30 "footprint", roughly registered to stars:
Click to view attachment
I've marked the two obvious moons.

There was a announcement of the Hubble findings.

I'm curious if it affects dust location predictions.

Yup- that's Nix and Hydra! Their distance from Pluto and Charon is getting quite large in the latest set.

John

John, I'm curious...How close will NH need to be before changes in Nix or Hydra's brightness can be detected over an orbit? I guess what I'm really asking is how close does the spacecraft need to be before hints of the satellites' chaotic rotations can be detected?

Andy

Just wondering, how do you start from something like this, with very few dots,

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encounte...0x633_sci_3.jpg

and end with something like one of your animation's frames, which have a lot more? Thanks and great work as always!