Here is a montage of recent images showing a complete Pluto rotation:

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The processing of the images is similar to what I've done earlier with one exception: Instead of Photoshop, I used ImageMagick to enlarge the images by a factor of 4 before stacking. In ImageMagick it's possible to select considerably better resampling than in Photoshop. I used Lanczos resampling when using ImageMagick.

The last image in the montage is an improved version of the 2015-06-15 image I posted yesterday. The most important difference is that two additional images had become available at the NH raw images website which meant I could stack four images instead of two.

Below is the same set of images in a less compact form - the good thing here is that Charon is included. The images of Charon show the same pattern as yesterday: Charon's left half is darker which implies that the polar terrain is darker than terrain closer to the equator. Remarkably, this was known before NH started imaging the Pluto system.

The orientation of Pluto in all of these images is similar to the orientation of the image I posted yesterday.

Pluto's bright limb at right in the 2015-06-13 image is almost certainly an image processing artifact. A comparable but smaller artifact is probably visible in the 2015-06-12 image as well.

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I recommend decreasing the brightness to about 85% before sharpening/deconvolving. It prevents the highlights from over saturating.

Yes, that's one improvement I'll do next time (although in this case it probably wouldn't add lots of details since the brightest areas are rather uniform in the source images).

But here is a *very* crude rotation movie I did from a map created from the images above. The exact shape and location of the major features is only approximate, partially because determining Pluto's exact position in these small images (necessary for creating a map) isn't very easy. The areas very near the pole are particularly inaccurate.

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2015-6-16 stacked images. Very similar process as I posted yesterday.

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Also, a 200% pixel resized blink animation between the stacked images and the processed image.

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Fort some reason there was some data loss in Charon from yesterday. Fewer details apparent. I'll try to pin down why that happened.

Edit: And, just for fun, here is the June 15 stack and June 16 stack animated.

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The "search for debris sources near Pluto" seems to use 8 sets of image-12-tuples, each image with 9967 ms exposure time. Here a first overview over the 8 sets of 2015-06-15, each set with the cleaned and summed image, minus some bias:


All 96 images combined:
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"Some" differencing between one of the latest footprint series and the above combined 2015-06-15 "search for debris sources near Pluto" image, blink gif:
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Nix and Hydra are obvious, Styx and Kerberos are a "might be" in this version of the 2015-06-15 combined and differenced image.
I hope I'll get the latter two more significant together with the 2015-06-16 series. Might make some software adustment necessary.

Pluto showing its Mars-like markings (at the moment) again today. I have darkened the original LORRI image slightly:

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Sorry Pluto is so small, I have Registax only and it is good for align & stack & some processing but enlarging images, not so much.

2015-06-16, "Search for debris sources near Pluto", series of 8x12 images is now completely available.
Here a cleaning/stacking of each set:


All 96 images combined/stacked:
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Based on Bjorn's images.

This is getting exciting isn't it?!

Yes, it is. And it's accelerating with 1/t, t --> +0.

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Blink gif between the two "Search for debris sources near Pluto" images, 2015-06-15 and 2015-06-16, each stacked from 96 LORRI 4x4 binned images, stacked images accurately registered:
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Blink gif between the two corresponding "ad-hoc" difference images:
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If I stare at the images long enough, I see this:

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My gosh, you're right!

Priceless. Send me that, I'd love to tweet it!

A mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in an ice-cream cone.

June 17th image - not deconvolved but selectively stretched. Those are probably real features on Charon.

Phil

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Looks like the bright side of Charon always faces Pluto. See if that holds up as we get closer...

Andy

Charon and Pluto are already known to be tidally locked to each other.

Absolutely true. But, what looks to be the bright side of Charon may not be the bright side when we get a close look at the other parts of the moon. It could turn out that what we are seeing right now is dim compared to an even brighter part of Charon that doesn't face Pluto.

But, yes, if it turns out this is the bright side of Charon, then it will always face Pluto.

In Icarus in 1992, Marc Buie et al. published maps of both Pluto and Charon made from mutual events (eclipses, occultations, whatever you want to call them). There are difficulties interpreting the data and the sides of each body facing away from the other are not covered by that data and are filled in using rotational lightcurves, but they do give an idea of albedo variation at better resolution than we have even now (and much better than Hubble).

The Charon map suggests bright markings near the equator facing Pluto, and at mid to high latitudes (both north and south) facing away from Pluto.

Phil

Has anyone tried to compare the current images to the albedo maps generated during the Pluto-Charon transits of 1985-1990?

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^ For those not familiar with the maps being talked about, Marc Buie appears to have uploaded them here, by the way ("work is based on photometric observations of Pluto taken between 1954 and 1986").

Thank you for finding these.

For reference, the updated Charon-facing side of Pluto:

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The Pluto-facing side of Charon:

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I have now made some improvements to my NH image processing by processing Pluto and Charon separately in one of the processing steps. I now used the curves in Photoshop to increase the contrast on Pluto (including Charon in this processing step made it too dark). I also darkened the images slightly before starting the processing chain.

And here's the result, a stack of four images from 2015-06-16:

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The amount of details keeps increasing. There is a spot of slightly darker terrain near the left edge of Pluto's disc - after inspecting the original images and some earlier images I think it's real. Interestingly this spot is very near Pluto's pole, in fact this might be the pole.

Edit: The file name I used is misleading and should have been pluto_charon_20150616_0007_4x.png


Yes, Charon is starting to show details - the dark feature is definitely real. It's also visible in other images processed by me and others here.

They uploaded several more images from 6-17. Below is a stacked and processed image. Similar process to previous ones from me. This time I also resampled the output for the single shot.

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Also, another flip between the stack and the processed images.

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I would have to say that everything visible at this point is very likely to be a real feature.

Should have the 6-18 processed up soon as well.

The first of the 4 6/18/15 1x1 bin images can be found here:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encounte...0x630_sci_1.jpg

Each of the 4 images shows Pluto with a "bump" on the right side. Is that an image processing artifact? I consider it suspect because it is exactly to the right in the images, which makes me think it may be CCD blooming.

But with a (admittedly not great) 4x enlargement, it doesn't look like a CCD artifact. But, I'll leave that to the experts.

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Andy

No, it's a bright spot with a dark spot on each side of it. The dark spots merge with the background in the image so you don't see them.

Phil

Phil, thank you for the quick response!

Andy

With Ceres bright spot (sopt#5) I learned that What we see more probably exist.
Improbable that artifacts are repeated.
I agree with you
it's a bright spot with a dark spot on each side of it.

Here is the stacked and processed image from June 18. This has been resampled to 200% with Lancsoz.

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And a flip animation with the stacked images once again.

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The really bright points near the bottom left terminator may be partial artifacts (as in not that sharply defined). Difficult to tell at this point. Four images isn't really a lot of data when stacking planetary objects so there is still a lot of room for noise to get in.

Looking nice and spot on with the first image on Buie's site.

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Here, I've tried to match Buie's map to a similar luminance of my processed image and then a map of a few very similar looking features.

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Got ahead of myself here without checking the orientation of Pluto. Updated with what I think should be correct. In this, the south pole would be toward the bottom in both correct?

Will night side imaging be possible using charon shine?

They are planned, we have the sensitivity to do this but we're unsure how bad the scattered light will be from these high-phase observations.

Here's my take on the shots from yesterday:

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OpNav Campaign 4, LORRI 4X4, update until 2015-06-17.
18 sets of 6, each stacked, 1%-quantile as black:

registered and animated, 2x magnified:

Album of full-sized (4x magnified) individual PNG frames used for the animated gif.

I've used the 1%-quantile as a systematic way to define a bias for the background level, since several pixels are much darker than most of the background. So stretching according to the darkest value would make most of the background rather bright. Using a fixed bias as I've done before left more brightness variations between the stacked images than necessary.

Went back and reprocessed the June 16 data. Two series here with a difference of approximately 12 hours.

Left image is the processed image, right is the flip animation.

Series 1
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Series 2
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And also a morph between these, showing a 12 hour rotation of the system.

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I am especially intrigued by the changing white area. Could be explained away by artifacts. I'm hoping not.

Fascinating animation; thank you, ZLD!

I think that a lot of those features are real, and to my untrained eye the variability of the white patch on Pluto doesn't look like an artifact. Looks much more like a change in illumination angle to me.

Also looks like a nice round dark spot on the 'top' of Charon in this orientation is real.

I'm honestly still holding out for some cloud-like atmospheric formations. Nitrogen snow storm perhaps.

Whoops. This one slipped by me all day I guess.

"Pluto and its Moon Charon, Now in Color"

MVIC won't be entirely useful for a while yet.

I everyone - I just got posting rights I've been doing my own image stacking / deconvolution for a while, and I've been curious: where are you all getting these images?

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&id=36099

Very useful, but I can't find the source.

Amazing how much Pluto is shaping up to look like Mars thusfar... though I'm sure that's just coincidental, the processes involved in sculpting the surfaces of these worlds have to be totally different. Also interesting how the main dark banding features are offset from the equator.

Also neat to see those Pluto maps from several years ago - that dark linear feature that opens up into a broader area with a light spot in the middle had shown up really clearly in one of my images from about a week ago at the same latitude; it's neat to see it in a formal published product as well!

Also, I agree with the earlier comments cautioning the overinterpretation of things like "impact basins" on these images... if you took a map of Earth and blurred it to the extent that Pluto is blurred, you'd likewise see "impact basins" all over the place. I uploaded an image as an example (hopefully it'll come through). That "impact basin" is the combination of Hudson Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, and the "raised" spot in the middle is Quebec.

Apparently not so.
But confirming that Pluto is beige, and Charon is gray do tell us that MVIC is functioning as it should and will perform well.

And thank you for your image processing work, the larger details really appear to be real, and an interesting comparison to the work by Buie.

I'm now sufficiently sure about Kerberos to post this intermediate version:
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I've marked it in one of the frames.

Styx may need some more processing to become evident.

The quality of the MVIC images are now quickly improving, though, and they should be comparable to the 'polar cap' LORRI images from April by now.

In this animated gif of four stacked and ad-hoc differenced "search for debris sources near Pluto" series of 2015-06-15 and 2015-06-16, the latest now complete with except of one out of 96 images, I've marked my best candidates for Kerberos (red) and Styx (turquoise) :
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A quick comparison of UM3K's processing of the June 18th images and Marc Buie's older rendered maps.

The hemispheres shown match up quite well in longitude, but Buie's maps are seen from about 10 degrees south of the equator and the LORRI images are taken over northern mid-latitudes, so there is a significant latitude shift.

The side of Charon visible here is the part mapped from mutual events, and is more detailed in Buie's map than in the LORRI image. Even so the resemblance is very striking, even down to the dark spot in the brighter area.

The side of Pluto seen here is the side facing away from Charon, which could only be mapped from rotational lightcurves (and their changes over the years), at very much lower resolution than LORRI gives. The match is not so good, partly due to the latitude difference, but also I think because the darkest spot is further south than lightcurve modelling suggested.

Phil

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... for completeness: stacking of the 383 images ("search for debris sources near Pluto" series of 2015-06-15 and 2015-06-16) :


combined (data-reduced) images, before differencing:

Have you checked out the APL's New Horizon site? See http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encounter/index.php

These schematic images can be generated at http://new-pds-rings-2.seti.org/tools/viewer2_plu.html

That's it, thanks! Really helpful for putting what one sees into context.

Here are the 2015-06-18 images as a stack of four images. The processing is similar to the processing of the 2015-06-16 images that I posted two days ago. The details in this image are very similar to um3k's image but there are some differences compared to ZLD's version (the main features are comparable though).

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The dark feature near the left limb that was present in the 2015-06-16 image I posted two days ago is present here as well and I think it might be a small dark polar cap. I'm pretty sure that this feature is real. Two big dark features are visible near the right limb. In the image it looks as if the upper and lower dark features are 'connected' by a narrow, vertical dark band but this thin band is probably a processing artifact (although I cannot completely rule out that it might be real).

The dark features are starting to show a more irregular shape and there seem to be some narrow dark features as well. I suspect we may sooner or later start seeing small bright spots within the dark terrain and/or small dark spots within the bright terrain.

The dark feature in Charon's left 'half' is now apparently resolved as two separate dark features and I think this is probably real and not a processing artifact.

I made no attempts to preserve the correct relative brightness of Pluto and Charon.

And here is the viewing geometry. The dark feature near the left limb that I mentioned above is clearly near Pluto's pole, in fact it might be centered on the pole although I'm not sure about this yet.

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Sorry, I obviously misunderstood your question when I directed you to the LORRI image page.

This is the 2015-06-18 Pluto image again but this time with a latitude/longitude grid. The pole is marked with a small black dot. The position of the lat/lon grid relative to the Pluto image shouldn't be too inaccurate. It could very well be off by +/- 5-10 pixels though as there are limits to how accurately I can estimate the exact position of Pluto's limb in the images. In contrast, the 'rotation' of the grid is very accurate since Charon's location can be used to determine it to high accuracy.
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