Wow!

It almost has a sense of depth.

Thanks Marvin. This wasn't from a raw image so it was basically working on the photo more for my own enjoyment than posting! There are some really talented people on this forum
who do great work - I've learned heaps from them!! It's late in Central Australia and I have to get up early tomorrow!! ……Hᴜɢʜ….ツ

wow..you can in black background?

This is a new version of my map incorporating the image obtained at a range of 738,000 km. It's not in color since (as fredk has shown in this post) the image was colorized with a single hue (i.e. clearly not with new MVIC data). Longitude 0 is at the left edge of the map.

EDIT: The color in the image is in fact from a recent MVIC image, it's just very uniform. So the image was not colorized with a single hue.

Click to view attachment

There are some minor feature position discrepancies along the boundary between the new image and the older data. Once I have more hi-res data I'll reproject the older images again, using the higher-res global images (or images where Pluto's limb is visible) as reference.

And here is a rotation movie rendered using this map:

Click to view attachment

You're lucky! My swear jar got so overfilled it imploded and created a miniature black hole. The only positive part of the mess it created is that I will not have to vacuum clean this week.

Serious, congratulation to the NH team and thank you 4throck for that image. I take that one as the final impression for this evening and now we can start looking forward to the images and information that will trickle down in days and weeks to come.

And far fewer craters than I expected, you guys were right on that part!

Love this global maps!!
we will have the south pole?

Fascinating!

The main part of the Heart looks for all the world like Greenland, with some "ground" exposed along its northern extent and glaciers covering the remainder. The whole thing looks a lot like a remnant icecap. There is definitely vertical relief to this feature. It also appears that the large, darker features to the left of the Heart (that include the head of the Whale) also form a plateau-like relief feature, in many ways reminiscent of a dark-toned remnant icecap. Maybe a lot of places on Pluto develop icecaps as time goes on, and some of them take longer to lose the deposited ices than others?

Also, throughout the northern plains, I'm seeing large-scale light-toned streaking that looks a lot like the wind streaks I was predicting in my WAG post. I also see one small, suspiciously dark streak-like feature that could be something like the black nitrogen geysers seen on Triton. If so, it's the only suggestion of one of those that I see in the entire image.

I think it will be extremely illustrative to see the surficial details of the "icecap" in the main body of the Heart, since it will likely show details of both ice/frost deposition and erosion. At this resolution it also appears to exhibit streaking or grooving, consistent with the winds that would blow from the most-highly-insolated north polar region towards the shadowed pole. I bet we see indications of different prevailing wind patterns, too, since these will change as Pluto's orientation to the Sun changes.

It'll be interesting to correlate the predominant deposition/erosion patterns to the Pluto system's orientation to the Sun over time, and to its distance from the Sun. I'm certain that, like Earth, one polar hemisphere gets higher insolation than the other due to correlations between aposol/perisol and seasonal tilt.

-the other Doug

Could a reasonable explanation for the crater density and location be that the northern ice sheet is thick enough to cover all of the craters. As the ice sheet melts during the northern summer, the craters are uncovered. What we are seeing in the more chaotic terrain north of the equator is the uncovering of the older surface.

At least one flaw in the theory is that the dark material at the equator should have more craters than it shows so far. It's like something swallows the impacts in the dark areas, although there are a few medium sized craters there.

Andy

Playing with contrast selectively across the image.

Phil

Click to view attachment

From information on Twitter and some (crude) measurements I did, it seems that the image was in fact colorized using higher resolution MVIC data than we have been seeing until now. But it is surprising to me how uniform the color is.

No sign yet of the ~170-pixel Charon LORRI image that should have come down in the Fail Safe D downlink yesterday according to elakdawalla's timeline? Or did I miss it?

Second that, there's some saturation variation and if you stretch the levels you get some white/pink areas related to different terrains.

Could you post your colour measurements, Bjorn? It does look awfully uniform.

I'm also intrigued by the resolution. Here's a comparison of the 1024x1024 press image (eg, on the NH site) with the lower-resolution (640x640) "preview" image posted earlier on instagram. I've Lanczos rescaled the instagram pic to 1024x1024, and then both images by 400%, and no other processing whatsoever:
Click to view attachment
The instagram image is https://igcdn-photos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphot...484233801_n.jpg and the 1024x1024 image is P_LORRI_FULLFRAME_COLOR.png. The instagram image is a jpeg, and appears to show more compression artifacts. But the 1024x1024 image shows some odd diagonal streaking (from the lower left to upper right). Perhaps the result of a rotation to put north up?

The overall impression is that the 1024x1024 image doesn't look much (or any) sharper than the 640x640. So I think we can look forward to better quality versions of this image.

Answering to JTN: Yep, only Pluto shared-on the conference

Little fun with the new image of Pluto.
Local contrast is enhanced and jpeg artifacts partially corrected by denoising.

I've redone my preview of the P_LORRI_STEREO_MOSAIC observation using Bjorn's updated map. I've highlighted the frames that will be played back in the next few days.

Click to view attachment

That's definitely Mars.

I added the Moon to your image for a more real-world comparison:

Yeah, but the saturation variation is pretty strongly correlated with brightness. Here's saturation on the left, and inverse of brightness on the right:
Click to view attachment
That's the kind of thing you might expect when colourizing, depending on exactly how it was done.

Still, you can see that it's not a perfect correlation, so this may not have been a trivial single-hue colourization.

The streaking looks very much like they performed a rotation on the image and then proceeded add a few sharpening techniques.

As for if the image was colorized, I was skeptical at first as well with the uniformity. However, I'm pretty sure it is actual MVIC data now.

Here is a comparison of the color channels from the released image and a colorized greyscale version of the image.

Click to view attachment

Now, there are a few ways that a synthetic color channel could produce a result somewhat similar to the image on the left but I don't think they did that.

I started checking after I had been working on an image, guessing at the colorization of Pluto, which apparently is now wrong.

Oh well, here it is. Wrongly colorized image of Pluto.
Click to view attachment
Again, wrongly colorized image!

Post #249

Great images, just to let you know, the caption says "spacecract"



EDIT: I've just thought, WHO IS LOOKING AT THE CAPTION !!!!!

Thanks Pando :-) good

The terrain above the dark region referred to as the whale seems particularly interesting with horizontal lines and black spots.

The human eye has interesting properties. If you rotate the image 90 degrees, you can see explicitly what they have not seen before.
Click to view attachment
Now it seems obvious that the left "heart chamber" is a large and deep basin. My interpretation of the that image. Physical conditions inside the basin cause condensation from atmosphere the bright material inside the basin. Condensated bright material on the right side and top of the image climbs in the form of tongue up the slopes. On the left side and bottom of the image is so much solidified bright material, that material "poured" out of the basin. It reminds me Antarctic glacier.

How interesting. The Oz-view of Pluto seems to bring out the landscape features in a way that would otherwise be missed--at least to my eyes. Good idea to step out-of-the-box; jars the senses from out of their lull borne of habit. I'd recommend that others consider examining the photos from all orientation, rather than just "the standard 'north.'"

Crude attempt to colorize last image of Pluto with low-res exaggerated color data from the MVIC imager.

Very good! Here is the release
Click to view attachment

Heart is split down the middle, and Charon's red pole might be coming from Pluto.

Very strange. Wouldn't have expected... well any of that really.

Obviously very exaggerated colors. I hope that's clearly explained to the press.

EDIT: Full press release for image. It's false color.

The image was created by the Ralph (not an acronym) instrument. The press release didn't say if it was Ralph's MVIC or LEISA component. LEISA is an infrared imaging spectrometer but it's difficult for me to say if this is LEISA or MVIC. One report said this was an MVIC image.

Andy

Edit: Changed to unknown whether this is MVIC or LEISA.

It's almost certainly from the MVIC and it's observation PC_Multi_Map_B_18.
Images were taken yesterday at 07:38:40 UTC with resolution 27.6 km/pixel.

I was half expecting somebody to come up to him and say shhh! The part where they all waved their little flags was somewhat surreal too, However, nothing can detract from this occasion and the success of the mission.

I think you guys are being a little hard on the poor guy playing MC. This was PR designed to emulate the current standard format for Big Happenings, modified for a major space event that was actually happening with a 4.5 hr time delay so no real-time gratification possible other than that. It was designed for a general audience, not for spaceflight aficionados such as ourselves. Many people would have just turned off the lectures.

EPO is far from the easiest thing in the world to do, as I'm sure that many of our members who do it can readily attest. In my opinion NASA TV did very well, all things considered.

So, apparently Pluto has almost no troposphere, "1-2 kms at best". And that's were 99% of the sublimation and circulation action is going on.

Click to view attachment

NASA has three streaming channels. They could have used one of them to document the actual historical activities going on in the auditorium instead of forcing everyone to watch a poorly produced and executed farce that was broadcast. No media outlet such as CNN would have shown that silliness, they would have taken the live auditorium feed if one had been available.

Is it thinner and denser, or is there just less of it overall?

-kap

"Eyes on Pluto" show NH targeting Earth ... It is now 10 minutes to the scheduled PHONE HOME signal .

Fernando

Still not known whether the heart is elevation or depression.

https://twitter.com/CosmicThespian/status/621041641764335616

NASA TV schedule change:

8:30 p.m., Tuesday, July 14 (0030 GMT/15 Jul) - New Horizons Phones Home - Mission Update (all channels)
9:30 p.m., Tuesday, July 14 (0130 GMT/15 Jul) - NASA News Briefing on New Horizon Mission (all channels)

Will that be the one telling us if all of the imaging activities went off as planned? - Maybe even give us an idea of how many megabytes were produced?

Whoa. Nice. It's an image in... spectral signatures.

Wonderfully varied landscapes.

--Bill

Eyes On Pluto is real time, so that means the signal will reach Earth 4.5 hrs or so later.

I don't post much - but I read avidly, and I'd like to thank all the UMSF regular posters.
I'll be glued to this thread, and NASA TV, after 8:30 tonight.

Mainly, I'm boggled at what a rich time this is for solar system exploration - we've got

Voyager probes exiting (and exiting and exiting) the solar system
A probe at Pluto
A probe at Saturn (and had a lander on Titan!!!)
Another probe arriving at Jupiter in a year
A probe at Ceres
A double probe on a comet
Two rovers on Mars, and multiple probes in orbit.
(skipping Earth)
Two active solar missions

...and recently
Other Mars missions
Orbiters and a lander on the Moon
A probe at Venus
A probe at Mercury

Its hard to keep up with UMFS these days.

ce

Hmm, why only near the pole? Is some of the atmosphere condensing there during the winter and leaving a dark residue behind when it evaporates as the seasons change, or (wild speculation) is it being channeled there by a magnetic field?

My crude attempt at overlaying the false colour with the LORRI pic.

It's what I understood this morning from Alice Bowman...but not 100% sure. Anyway, this Will not be only aCarrier saying "I'm alive" it'll be like a 20-30 mn com.

My guess would be that the Pluto/Charon gravitational field is such that tholin particles coming from Pluto's atmosphere end up landing at Charon's poles (the south pole being unlit right now) due to a lower gravitational potential barrier there.

Twenty years ago, when mission concepts for Pluto were being proposed, it was regarded as a small, boring lump of ice on the edge of the solar system. It didn't really seem worth doing a multi-billion dollar mission for that, so it was a good thing that Johns Hopkins trimmed the science requirements to the point where it could be done for $600 million. I think it is safe to say that Pluto is turning out to be far more interesting than expected.

The surface color reminds me of the Huygens picture of the surface of Titan, which is probably because it is made of similar stuff. Titan and Pluto both have nitrogen atmospheres with a trace of methane. Pluto adds carbon monoxide to the mix, which opens up additional chemical possibilities. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the red color is probably related to the nitrogen abundance. I can't think of any colored compounds made of just carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, but nitrogen has a number of red and brown compounds. Nitrogen dioxide is reddish-brown. Azo dyes are two six membered carbon rings linked by a pair of nitrogen atoms, and some of them are orange-red. In a molecule it is really the bonds that are involved in light absorption, and bonds involving nitrogen often absorb in the visible range.

There has been some discussion of surface liquids. Liquids requires both adequate temperature and pressure. Surface conditions on Pluto are projected to be 33-55 Kelvin and 1 Pascal of pressure. Looking at a table of triple points, the closest I can come is ethane which requires at least 90 K and 0.8 Pa of pressure. Ethane is two carbon atoms joined together, surrounded by six hydrogens. Liquids close to their boiling points are not very stable or long lived, because they tend to evaporate quickly. Mixtures can have lower boiling points than any of the pure components involved, but I would be very surprised if that made enough of a difference for liquids to be viable under current conditions. If there was any liquid ethane near the surface of Pluto the atmosphere would be very rich in ethane vapor, which it isn't, although ethane has been detected on the surface.

From emily's twiter feed:

Related link (with a map): http://hubblesite.org/explore_astronomy/skywatch/episodes/8

Also: