^^That is Awesome!

21/06/2015. Four stacked images in MaximDL.

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Surface variation on Charon is now easily visible in the unedited raw images. Awesome.

Two-frame animation of Charon 20-21 June, cropped-only:

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...and enlarged version

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Just stacked 2 images from 4 available on June 21 (less fussing with alignment that way). Messed about with the gamma and Lanczos tools. This "method" loses any detail seen on Charon. Obviously not as good as others, but I had fun trying anyway:)

Alan or anyone else -- will the color image resolutions continue to lag behind the b&w images through July 14? Or can we expect the hi-res images immediately after closest approach to be in (or quickly converted to) color?

June 21, 2015

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Flip animation
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Large scale cratering or still just basins?

Theres another double capture from the 20th that I plan to do a morph for later on today.

If they are basins that's a BIG Wow!

I have the impression that MVIC color imagery is about 1/5th the resolution of LORRI in b&w.

On another note, one might consider the present LORRI resolution of Pluto to be about that of the naked eye on Earth's moon. It's interesting to consider how many "pixels" we can visually see on the moon, though I think the numbers are now similar.

This is my contribution: the four LORRI frames merged with the MVIC color from last month:

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THAT is a 'whoa!!!!!', Ian!!! Growing more tantalizing by the hour now!

How accurate is the brightness/color differential between Pluto & Charon here, or is this purely art?

It's as real as the original MVIC / LORRI data would suggest, nprev

My guess is that the best use of the lower-res MVIC images will be to colorize the LORRI images (there's already been an example here just above this post) in much the same way that the talented artists here have used low-res color images with high-res grayscale images for many other objects. Right around flyby time, the NH team may be putting out low-res color and high-res grayscale just due to time pressure, but I've no doubt that the folks here will make good use of all images released!

Are these pictures in the kind of color the human eye would perceive (I hesitate to call it "true color " lest I sound anthropocentrist)? If not, are any pictures like that planned? Should we also expect the raw MVIC pics to be uploaded at some point, just like the LORRIs? I hope I don't sound spoiled I'm just reeeeally puuuumped! Go New Horizons!

Here are the 2015-06-21 images as a stack of four images. Processing comparable to the 2015-06-18 image except that I added destriping as a final processing step since the 2015-06-18 image I posted earlier had some obvious horizontal image resizing artifacts.

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Pluto's bright terrain is suddenly starting to look mottled. I'm not sure all of these small scale details are real but paraisosdelsistemasolar's 2015-06-21 image is rather similar.

Charon is now getting really interesting with its big, dark area breaking up into probably at least three separate, dark spots.

Ian R's color image looks lovely and probably hints at what MVIC's color images are going to be like once NH is closer to Pluto.

Don't know the current processing strategy for MVIC data but it features, methane narrow, near infrared wide, red wide, and blue wide band filters. The green channel has to be synthesied by combining NIR, R and B and subtracting it from a neutral image from LORRI. As for the recent video from MVIC, I have no idea what they used for the final release.

Also, MVIC has a 256x256 CCD while LORRI is 1024x1024.

Perhaps it would be possible to check/adjust the MVIC colors of Pluto and Charon with independently obtained color data, such as the Hubble maps. I also note that color adjustment was done subjectively in some posts from the NH Jupiter encounter.

These are approximately opposite hemispheres of both bodies from the June 18th and 21st observations, using various composites of images posted above. North is at the top.

Phil

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For the first time, the right hand image gave me the impression not just of albedo markings but of two large craters looming near the terminator. It will be interesting to see how soon we can actually verify geologic features such as craters... I'm aware we are still working with very low resolution and possible image processing artifacts.

Way too soon to be talking about craters. You could blur an image of Earth to this level and see similar features all over the place.

Beat me to it!

Check out these images of the Moon, LRO wide angle mosaics. The LORRI Pluto images are almost full moon illumination - we wouldn't see shadows anyway in this geometry. But even in this moon image which has lots of shadows, see how small the shaded slopes are compared with the light and dark markings. Next to it is the same image shrunk down to about 12 pixels across and then enlarged - it's roughly comparable to the deconvolved LORRI images in resolution - and all those shadows are gone. There is no way we can see any topography in the current images. As a rough guess, I would say we won't see topography until the raw images are at least 100 pixels across.

Phil

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Oh, I agree, Phil -- with one important codicil.

In this solar system (and, I suspect, throughout this Universe), most of the circular features seen on a solid body are somehow the result of impact, or their shapes have been controlled -- as with many of the generally circular lunar maria -- by impact. The lunar maria I mention are not in and of themselves impact features, but a majority of them fill impact basins and thus their overall shapes are defined by impact processes. I would go so far as to say that impacts form almost all of the circular features on solid bodies without atmospheres, and a vast majority of them on planets with thin atmospheres. (Yes, I know that Io is something of an exception, but then again, Io doesn't retain impact features for more than a second or two, geologically speaking, and there are few if any other bodies in the solar system with that particular characteristic.)

When I see what appear to be circular features on a solid body with a thin to non-existent atmosphere, I'm generally going to assume impact processes are responsible for the circularities, until I see evidence otherwise.

We are seeing, even at this resolution, some circular-looking albedo features on both Pluto and Charon. (And, of course, many non-circular features, as well.) In point of fact, the circular-looking features in the degraded image of the Moon you put together (excellent work, BTW) are in fact features whose shapes are defined by impacts.

Again, I agree that we can't say anything definite yet about the topography on either of the bodies that are just now coming into useful resolution through New Horizons' cameras. But when I see something that is resolving out as a circular feature, I'm going to begin to strongly suspect that it's an impact feature.

This way, anything circular that ends up not being an impact feature becomes an incredibly delightful surprise...

-the other Doug

Alan,

Even though the flyby doesn't involve a landing or an orbital insertion, will good luck peanuts still be appropriate? And at what time should we pull them out for maximum effect?

Or is that custom restricted to another institution ...

TTT

I think it's still appropriate. There is no going back for a flyby if something goes wrong...

The huge circular volcanic features of Mars might be considered another exception.

Regarding colorizing grayscale images with MVIC to produce high-res color: we'll be able to do that with the data downlinked in September, but there isn't much in the data that will be available as of July 20 that will be appropriate for colorization. I think there are only 3 MVIC observations that are going to be downlinked during the time around the flyby, only one of which is really perfect for colorizing a LORRI pic from a similar geometry, and it's not of Pluto, it's of Charon:

Monday, July 13 at 16:25 UT / 12:25 ET / 09:25 ET: 3hr 30m downlink: Fail Safe D: MVIC Pluto and Charon color at 28 km/pix (~86 and ~43 pixels across disk). Taken 2015-07-13 07:37:55. Range 1.406 & 1.418 million km. ­- Can be used to colorize LORRI Charon image in same downlink; less good for colorizing later Pluto image because of 12.5-hour time difference, during which Pluto will rotate about 30 degrees

Thursday, July 16 at 13:23 UT / 09:23 ET / 06:23 PT: 4hr 15m downlink: First Look E: MVIC Pluto and Charon color at 4.9 km/pix (~490 and ~245 pixels across disks). Taken 2015-07-14 06:49:08. Range 254,000 and 269,000 km. - Color portrait of Pluto & Charon in same image

Saturday, July 18 at 10:30 UT / 06:30 ET / 03:30 PT: 4hr 36m downlink: High Priority B: MVIC Nix color at 3.1 km/pix (~34 pixels across disk). Taken 2015-07-14 08:02:39. Range 165,000 km. - The best color image of Nix that will be available during encounter period; may be used for stereo with image returned in First Look B

(This is all from my What to Expect post)

Hi!

This is my firt post on UMSF. My name is Fred and i am from Normandy, France...

The best image I could get from the 4 LORRI images of last sunday is :



I also made a small animation of Nyx and Hydra moving around Pluto and Charon from the bin x4 LORRI images between the 1st and 18th june :

http://www.sahavre.fr/forum/download/file....4&mode=view

See you soon

Fred

Pluto is looking more and more like a golf ball!

Here is a chart with Pluto Viewer and the image I processed tonight :

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Hello Fred ! Welcome to the UMSF forum.
I'll spend some of my vacation time at Petites-Dalles (76)... (besides, one of the few places on Earth where we can still witness the effects of an old Mars-like megaflood event with cliffs retreating 1 m per year : https://notexactlyrocketscience.files.wordp...=500&h=290I )
I just love Upper-Normandy !
Thanks for your VERY NICE contribution

Here is my quick-and-dirty of that image. There seems to be an intriguing linear feature running from the upper left to lower right of the disk. I want to call it a tectonic feature, but it is a line, which could be albedo related, a crater rim, a processing artifact - who knows!

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Dvandorn said:

"most of the circular features seen on a solid body are somehow the result of impact, or their shapes have been controlled -- as with many of the generally circular lunar maria -- by impact."


That is generally true, though there are exceptions as already noted.

But I want to make a very important point about it. You have to know the object really is a circle, by having a decent number of pixels across it. In these Pluto images the disk is only 10 pixels or so across and the small albedo markings we are talking about are often only about 1 pixel across. The very dark spot near the southern limb is larger, but not much larger. To make small features easier to see, most of us are enlarging the images by factors of 4 or more. With interpolation, a single pixel becomes pretty much circular regardless of its true shape. As a rule of thumb, don't assume a spot is circular until we have about 5 pixels across it in the raw data (that is the old USGS guideline).

Phil

For the sake of comparison, here's a completely uniform 10px disk, with 1% gaussian noise added, resampled to 4x the original size and unsharp masked.
The "details" look quite convincing, but they are nothing more than the processing arranging noise into patterns.
So yes, ordered details from random noise!

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Very good point. This is one of the reasons I usually check my processed NH images against the original images if I notice something new and/or particularly interesting. If it's real it should be possible to detect at least subtle hints of it in the original images.

It isn't shocking to get feature like blobs from a guassian noise generator because gaussian noise functions as a means of normal / natural distribution. The difference in this setting is that we can expect real features versus being completely blind and unknowing. This isn't to say we don't need to hesitate before asserting anything is real. As Bjorn suggests, so long as something can be correlated, even just slightly, to the unprocessed data, we can more reliably say something is likely to be a real feature.

A simple, but striking realization I had recently, and one that is sure not to be original, but was new to me:

As Pluto and Charon are tidally locked, we know there is a history of tidal interaction, and therefore, of internal heat. Elsewhere, tidally-generated heat has produced spectacular effects (Io) though in other cases, tidal locking has left virtually no obvious results.

Whatever the case may be with Pluto and Charon, it is likely that the results would be greater on Charon than on Pluto: Tidal forces vary according to many factors, and in the case of Pluto and Charon, the distances are equal, but the masses and radii are not, and this indicates that, all other things being equal, Pluto should have induced about 4x larger tidal forces on Charon than Charon has on Pluto.

Which is a long-winded way of saying: Charon just might be the more interesting (or thermally evolved) of the pair.

We'll see soon enough.

^I've wondered that too. The ammonia hydrates discovered on its surface years ago certainly raise that possibility -- good thing we'll find out soon!

Circular features in the solar system are overwhelmingly impact-related below a certain size, but above a certain size, that may not be true.

Particularly, when circular features are concentric around a pole, there are explanations related to volatile movement and tectonics.

Away from poles, we see tectonics manifesting in Ganymede's Galileo Regio, the Earth's Pacific Ocean and perhaps Antarctica, a massive topographical shift covering much of the northern hemisphere of Mars (which happens to circle a pole, but perhaps coincidentally), coronae at Venus, Miranda, and perhaps Titan, hemispheral asymmetry on the Moon, and leading/trailing exogenous phenomena on many of Saturn's moons, Europa, and Callisto. Triton seems to have longitudinal bands related to frost deposition far from its poles, and both Ganymede and Mars have subtle versions of the same.

There are massive circular albedo features related to impacts, too, but we can count the largest ones on our fingers, and they may be outnumbered by the non-impact related ones, depending on how we define the categories.

June 22, 2015 data below.

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Flip animation
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Excellent point about tidal heating, JRehling. It would seem to me, though, that most of the tidal heating would occur while the two bodies were going through the process of tidally locking to one another. Once the librations have settled down, you'd have far less pull happening inside the two bodies, seeing as the rotations of each have now been damped into the synchronous lock. You'd expect the most heating to happen while the rotation rates were slowing down to complete the locking process.

With the far greater distance between small bodies once you get out as far as the Kuiper belt, accretion via gravitational attraction and random collisions is a far slower process for bodies as far out as Pluto. Since the smaller moons are still tumbling chaotically, I imagine there's at least a chance (if not a high-level probability) that Pluto and Charon came to be tidally locked relatively recently, at least as far as geological time goes.

If so, the heating may have happened relatively recently, and the bodies may still be in the process of cooling down. Now, that would make a most interesting set of observations.

-the other Doug

Re #CraterGate, I'd also mention that the one presumed Pluto-like object we've visited thus far, Triton, has very few visible impact craters. So there are several reasons one should not rush the crater spotting.

(my layperson self expect relatively few impact craters due to freezing-thawing cycles alone)

Here's my version of today's image:

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There's definitely a feature visible near Pluto's right limb, and Charon's got all sorts of stuff going on. Some of it may even be real!

Other Doug, an interesting way to put it is that Pluto is only about 18 million years (Pluto years) old. To the extent that evolution depends upon the number of revolutions, Pluto's younger now than the Earth was when the Moon formed. That's not entirely a fair comparison (wide open spaces in a shallow part of the Sun's gravity well invite more long-distance interactions), but it does open the possibility that Pluto isn't on the same clock as most of the other worlds with which we're familiar.

My take on the June 22 images, result is similar to um3k's. Magnified 4x from original pixel scale.

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Being roughly one Plutonian day ago, I went back to reprocess the June 15th data with the same method for today, June 22.

Below is a cycling animation notating similar features.
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And the separate frames here.
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I'm not sure why the linear feature seems less apparent in my processing of the June 22 data but I can tell it is still there. Just less contrast for some reason that I wasn't able to resolve.

Also, the large dark, circular roundish(?) feature remains apparent on Charon. June 15 below.
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And just to clear up why these look different than Ugordan's and um3k's, the primary difference is I work with the images a lot darker and haven't resampled them with lancsoz.

Heres the same image I posted above with the exception that I first reduced it 40%, then resampled it 200% with a lancsoz process and finally increased the gamma by a factor of 1.85.
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This thread is reminding me more and more of my latest visit to my optician.
"Can you read the last line?"
"Yes, it is a k... no wait, an m. And then there is a b.... or a g.... But I'm sure it's a v and a q at the end. Or perhaps it's an n and a t."
"Ok son, we'll just try the line above that one again..."
:-)

We have four different versions of the June 22nd images now, each processed a bit differently. This is a composite of the four.

Phil

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Or move closer to the target :-).

Here is my version of the 2015-06-22 images. The result is similar to um3k's and Gordan's versions of these images. The main exception is that I clearly used more sharpening but the details are similar. I managed to largely avoid the resampling artifacts (horizontal lines) that I had some problems with in some earlier images, probably by not converting the images to 16 bits until after I enlarged them using ImageMagick. Seems strange and I need to look more closely at this.

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The dark feature very near or at Pluto's pole continues to be visible and I continue to suspect it to be a small, dark polar cap. The bright terrain continues to look mottled (which it didn't a few days ago in lower-res images) and these features are probably at least partially real. The dark spot near the right limb at ~(203,354) is definitely a real feature and the brighter spot next to it is probably real as well.

Charon is now showing lots of interesting details. In particular the small, 'bright' spot near the center of Charon's disc is a real feature but its brightness relative to the darker terrain is exaggerated here.


Now there are five versions!

And here a sixth one !

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Looking at fred_76's version, I have to wonder how Triton would have looked at this resolution with this type of processing? It doesn't take too much imagination to see cantaloupe terrain on the left (northern) side of Pluto with a bright polar cap to the south (right side).

Andy

The "basin" at the pole in the lower half might just be part of (one end of?) a discontinuous black polar band:

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(from yesterday's release)

Unfortunately (well, one hemisphere it has to be...), the apparently massive dark area in the polar region on Pluto's lower half is on the hemisphere of Pluto that will be imaged at relatively low resolution.