Alan Stern seems happy with the view of Pluto we will have.

...the “close approach hemisphere”... has the greatest variety of terrain types seen on the planet so far.

“This system is just amazing,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, from the Southwest Research Institute, in Colorado. “The science team is just ecstatic with what we see on Pluto’s close approach hemisphere. Every terrain type we see on the planet – including both the brightest and darkest surface areas – are represented there, it’s a wonderland."

http://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/...hat-683405.html

Since the satellite system implies that Pluto once had substantial rings, could some of the banding near the equator be the result of material that had resorbed back into Pluto, i.e. an equatorial impact band?

It would be quite interesting to see evidence of this process for the first time, since all other objects that have or possibly had rings either have no solid surface or have/had impact-erasing geology.

I thought the consensus for the Voyager Mountains/equatorial ridge on Iapetus was that it was caused by an equatorial impact band from a ring system?

Here is an animation from the 16th up to the 22nd June. I tried to faster than Emily

All images have been processed with IRIS from Christian Buil and the following sequence :
- registration of all 3 or 4 LORRI images from each date
- addition with min-max rejection
- x1.33 the levels for the days with only three photos available
- move the background level to 0
- deconvolution using Vancittert method, FWHM=2.3 and 4 iterations
- spline upscale by a factor of 4
- wavelet with factors 4, 2, 1.2 and a remain factor of 0.80
- save !

Then I surimposed the resulting files on the grid provided by Pluto Viewer (barycentric, viewed from New Horizons from 45000 km).

The GIF size has then been decreased by a factor of 2 otherwise the animation would have been too big to fit in most screens...

Enjoy !

Clic on the thumbnail to start the animation :
Click to view attachment

Fred

Can't wait to find out what the "streamer" on June 19th looks like up close!

"I thought the consensus for the Voyager Mountains/equatorial ridge on Iapetus was that it was caused by an equatorial impact band from a ring system?"

It's not a consensus, it's one of the competing hypotheses. Other explanations are tectonic, related to de-spinning or other processes.

Also, Rhea turned out to have a chain of curious impact scars right along its equator which have been attributed to debris from a small ring hitting the surface.

And Pan and Atlas and a bunch of small asteroids have equatorial ridges which may also be related to rings - Pan and Atlas receiving sediment from Saturn's rings, the asteroids from decaying rings of their own.


Phil

APOD for Fred !!

Your work looks very similar to the official versions, Fred. Nicely done.



Indeed, I just think it is sad that we might not get a very good view of the "heart" of this feature (if only Pluto could have rotated faster ). Scientifically, it might not be particularly preferable; but aesthetically, on the other hand...

How many pixels exactly Pluto will be across when we get our best view of this area I don't know, but somewhere in this range?:



http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=219072

The dark pole on Charon is interesting and something we've never seen before on any major object (that I'm aware of). The contrast with Pluto's bright caps makes it even more noteworthy. Darker hydrocarbon ices perhaps?

Edit: Mike Brown speculates it's a lack of bright ice flows from an ancient interior ocean that once erupted materials onto the surface.

Io has darker poles, doesn't it? *rubs chin*

You are correct. Silly me for forgetting Io. Not that that makes Charon's dark pole any less intriguing.

I think the comparison with Io may even bolster the theory for ancient Charon cryovolcanism.

The size of Charon is far too small on the available images to figure out any details on its surface. Most of what we see to date are deconvolution artifacts. It is therefore very challenging to try to justify the "darker pole" by any theory as long as we don't see more details.

I will try tonite to make another animation of the couple to show their evolution from the 15th june up to the last images received.

Fred

I Also would like to know this..
Very interesting that long area dark.
How many pixels exactly Pluto will be across when we get our best view of this area:?

The darkening is apparent in the June 22 raw images, deconvolution or no deconvolution. It seems pretty clear to me that there exists a dark area at or near Charon's pole, only its morphology is a question mark at this point, IMHO.

---edit---

These two traces are background stars, not Styx and Kerberos. Kerberos is however visible of the images of the 16th.

Maybe a faint trace of Styx and Kerberos on the 22th june's 9967 ms exposure images (see the red arrows) :

Click to view attachment

I had to do an extensive deconvolution (MEM 10 with Iris) to get those traces... However, nothing visible in the 2967 ms photos of the 23rd of June.
---edit---

Kerberos was already slightly visible of the images of the 16th june, but not Styx, this is quite an evidence that Styx is really smaller than Kerberos, I would say less than 20 km in diameter.

Click to view attachment

Ok so another large post from me. While we wait for the June 23 data to come down, I went back and reprocessed the June 20 data with a new method.

Processed image, flip animation, context image
----------------------------------------------------
June 20, series 1

Click to view attachmentClick to view attachment

----------------------------------------------------
June 20, series 2

Click to view attachmentClick to view attachment


This was a much longer span of time so I was unsure if it would even work as a morph but it seemed to work just fine. This one is Plutocentric because it was aggravating enough with the large span of time .

16 hours of Pluto rotating

ZLD,
Just a comment- in the blink of the June 20 series data, the white spot surrounded by the pixel-wide "dark loop" just to the left of Pluto's pole is probably ringing due to image processing. You're pushing the limits of the data, and I really wouldn't believe any feature smaller than a couple of pixels.

The instrumental PSF, remember, is a few pixels across and clearly not circularly symmetric. If people are using procedures that implicitly assume a circularly symmetric PSF, those procedures will inevitably produce odd artifacts. About the only thing I would trust is maybe very light unsharp masking (of course, that usually uses a Gaussian profile for the convolution), or perhaps drizzling-type efforts (but I'm not really sure about those either).

With the lack of bright stars in the 1:1 images, I suppose using old images of Charon [when it was still point-like] in the 1:1 binned images is the best one can do for approximating the PSF. Fighting... urge... to... install... IRAF...

Jeff

Jeff, this feature is clearly visible in the data released by the science team here.

Below is the relevant image.

.

Edit
------

For completeness here, a quick comparison for the June 22 stack.

Bjorn's on left (whom I highly regard as an imaging wizard!), my new process on right (exact same as I used for the June 20th above)
Click to view attachment

Extremely similar imo. No ringing that I can see. I was pretty unhappy with my June 22 so I set out to improve my process.

New images coming down? Maybe. Look at the data rate.

Click to view attachment

Patience is a virtue!

I just meant the pixel-thick dark oval-shaped thingy here:
Click to view attachment

That there is a dark area near the pole seems certain; I wasn't arguing against that. (And, yes, Bjorn does magic with images; no insults to anybody were intended.) Note that the JHU deconvolutions aren't showing pixel-level details, because they can't. That's all I'm saying, nothing more, and I'll shut up now.

New images down, my efforts pretty basic (I don't do or even have the ability to do much processing, so I am just emphasizing what I have a good degree of confidence is really there):

Click to view attachment

Still having fun!

2015-06-23
23:34:00 UTC

Processing: Loaded 3 images in GIMP, scaled to 400% for alignment, manually stacked, scaled down 50% (aka 200% of the original). Reduced brightness by 25 points to prevent washing out, while simultanously reducing contrast by the same amount to prevent loss of black data and the hiding of JPEG artifacts around the planet (something I find important in order to have an idea of whether details I can see on the planet are real or just jpeg noise!). Ran two unsharp masks to bring the detail way out, then ran a couple 1-pixel wide gaussian blurs to remove some of the fake "detail" caused by jpeg noise (although as you can tell by the faint remainder of jpeg artifacts around Pluto there's probably a little noise... not to the level of any major features though).

I strongly caution against trying to read any "mountains" or "craters" or the like into this - one needs to keep in mind that the contrast in such images has been stretched tremendously, and thus what one interprets as a "shadow" probably isn't. Also, single pixels here represent a bloody huge amount of area. And as always, rough / "missing" areas on the limb are just camera, jpeg, and/or processing artifacts.

What you're seeing is almost certainly just variations in terrain albedo, not shadows. Now of course, terrain albedo variations may be caused by impacts, but it's way too early for us to be presuming anything like that!

Hi!

It is done, Kerberos is on the scene. Here is the confirmation.

These two images are showing the same area of the sky between the 16th june and the 22nd june. The red arrow is showing Kerberos where Pluto Viewer is placing it on an image done the 16th June. However it could be a false alarm, such as a star from the background.


So I compared the same area of the sky as captured by NH 6 days later. Though this image is slightly less resolved than those of the 16th, there is nothing at this place.

Therefore, Kerberos is now visible on the binx4 photos.

Click to view attachment

However, still nothing visible at Styx location...

Fred

---edit- many new pictures have just been released with binx4 10 s exposures. It could be now possible to reperforme the quest for these moons.

Very cool. Any clue how good of images of Styx and Kerberos we're going to end up with on the flyby?

Yes, read a few posts earlier, it is well explained.

My try with new images from LORRI.
Result is 5× magnified.

This version is enlarged x3. Each image was processed by combining several different contrast stretches of itself, but no deconvolution. Then all three images were merged.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Some concern expressed above about not seeing all of the dark southern region at closest approach. Don't worry! It look to me like we will see the terminator crossing the dark area at quite good resolution, and that's exactly what we want. If it's all on the disk we don't get that terminator view which may be crucial for interpretation.

Phil

Here's my contribution: I've rotated the image so that north is up, and enhanced the enlarged image (500% via smooth bicubic re-sampling) with a mixture of high-pass filters.

Click to view attachment

Improved version with the second sequence from the 23.6.2015.

.

My take on June 23 series 2. Same process as June 20 and June 22 as shown above.


Click to view attachment

Click to view attachment
(click to animate)

Definitely got some slight ringing on the edge of the white blob near the pole. This is only a stack of 3 frames, so a full quarter less data. More noise is likely present.

As for the potential for ringing on the June 20th image, the notated area may be an artifact but I don't believe it to be due to deconvolution ringing.

--------------------
Edit
--------------------
And here is June 23 series 1.

Click to view attachment

Click to view attachment
(click to animate)

Quest for Styx and Kerberos, 2015/06/23 update

Click to view attachment

* Kerberos is here again
* Styx still not yet visible

"Search for debris sources near Pluto", 2015-06-22:

and "Search for sources of hazardous material", 2015-06-23:


Combined images as gif, my best candidates for Kerberos (red) and Styx (green) marked, without prior lookup of the expected positions:
Click to view attachment

Edit: Link to preceeding sequence with Kerberos and Styx candidates marked.

The latest PI's perspective has a new deconvolved image of Pluto and Charon from 19 June.

If I am interpreting the image correctly, it appears that the black band or dark area near the south pole in the southern hemisphere of Pluto actually has a bright area in the middle of it or entering it. Or something. I guess it'll just get messier the better images we get.

Click to view attachment

Click to view attachment

(north is up in both images)

EDIT: it's seems to be the last frame of the animation that was released a few days ago. My bad.

Gerald, it seems that the Pluto Viewer orbital parameters for Styx are uncorrect. Kerberos predicted positions fit observations, but not Styx's...

Interesting. That's maybe the reason, you didn't find Styx.
The signal looks rather clear to me. Here a difference image for the latest "search_for_debris_sources_near_Pluto" sequence:
Click to view attachment
Modulo a translational offset, the expected positions are provided on the New Horizons server. I've compared that position for the sequence last week (2015-06-16), but not yet for the 2015-06-22 series.

But there seem to be also some moving artifacts, i.e. reflections of Pluto in the optical system or something, in the images.

I`m only now beginning to get an appreciation of the imaging system on board NH.
Here we are, still 22+million kilometres from our target and we are beginning to see
actual surface detail.
I haven`t the resources, but can anyone say what Pluto`s apparent magnitude would be
at this `close`distance. My thoughts are, it would still be fairly faint ~ mag 4???
How would it appear to a space traveller?

Pluto's mean apparent magnitude from Earth is ~15. Apparent magnitude is measured on a logarithmic scale, with one unit increase representing a decrease in brightness by a factor of 2.5.

Right now, NH is 22.3 million km away from Pluto, that's 15% of one AU. Pluto is about 40 AU from the Earth on average. So NH is now a factor ~267 closer. Since brightness of the reflected light diminishes with the square of the distance, Pluto from NH should be 71000 times brighter, which corresponds to roughly 12 magnitudes. So it should appear as a 3rd magnitude star.

It should be a bit brighter if we consider that Pluto is closer to the sun now than at its mean distance, by a good fraction of a magnitude.

Agreed, and to emphasize that: When a body is seen in gibbous phase, shadows would only be visible near the terminator and at much better resolution than we have now. As two points of comparison: (1) Shadows due to lunar terrain are never visible to the naked eye and rarely to modest (~10x) magnification, and only then right on the terminator. (2) Shadows due to martian terrain are almost never visible from any earth-based telescopes (which always show a fat gibbous or full phase). I have seen very vague indications of the shadow of Olympus Mons in only a couple of the most exceptional earth-based images of Mars – and that's the almighty Olympus Mons!

We're a long way from the resolution and phase combination where we could be seeing shadows on Pluto.

Today is the page with the RAW previews really active.
Newest image from 22.9 millions km.

LORRI team did mind-bogglingly good job. In terms of resolution to mass ratio no one is even close to them (in case of missions beyond Earth orbit).

Morph from June 23 series 1 to series 2. Time span of 20 hours, 2 hours per second.


(click to animate)

Being such a long span of time, there are several areas that appear to have artifacts during the transition. Once again, series 2 lacked a 4th frame and there may be artifacts from that as well.

Stacked 2 images from June 25 using Registax, using gamma curve tool and Lanczos filter then cropped and enlarged 200% using Paint.

Click to view attachment

When I was enlarging Pluto and Charon I thought I saw a dim (moon?). Anyway I did not see it again, and it didn't make the cut.

These images of Pluto are beginning to remind me of the far-encounter images of Mars from Mariners 6 and 7. Getting clues about the albedo patterns, but still not close enough to characterize the surface in either a local or a global view.

With New Horizons, though, we'll be getting more than just the two small areas of Mars that those 1969 flybys gave us in much higher resolutions, which will make a great deal of difference.

I am really, really getting antsy for the incredible images that will start to come down over the next few weeks. It's a little like how I felt in late June of 1969, having graphed and plotted every scheduled event of the upcoming Apollo 11 mission and left to just wait for it to start. It's hard to wait to see something you've been looking forward to seeing most of your life...

-the other Doug

The latest raw images from today are amazing. Deconvolution is clearly no longer necessary to really enjoy the images.

Don't change your Avatar just now, O Doug, no one will ever notice

Here is my version of the 2015-06-25 05:37 images. This is a stack of two images. To get similar orientation to the earlier images this image is upside-down relative to the JPGs at the raw images website.

Click to view attachment

Pluto's apparently bright limb at right is at least partially (and maybe entirely) a processing artifact. Pluto looks somewhat mottled not far from the left limb and judging from the original images, this mottling is probably at least partially a real feature.

Charon looks increasingly interesting and it is now clear that it is a fairly high-contrast body.