This is the most incredible picture I have ever seen. In May, the best picture of Pluto was a couple blown up pixels. Now, it looks like a render from a Pixar movie.
This shows a time slider, where you can see the different images, along with the time and distance from Pluto. They have been pretty quick to update it with new images too, so I look forward to the final image(s?) being added.
The "sepia" is actually true color. New Horizon's high resolution camera takes black and white photos, but NASA sometimes releases them supplemented with color information from other sensors.
Argh, I was just preparing to write a rant about this. No, it is absolutely not true-color -- although this is something which NASA insists on claiming, to its detriment. It annoyed me when they used the same technique to show a "true color" view of the surface of Titan[1], and it's annoying me again now.
What this image shows is the average color Pluto. The colour information comes from a much lower-resolution image, which was unable to resolve color differences between regions. In truth, Pluto could be wildly multi-colored -- but these kind of images, tagged with the "true color" label, lead you to think that that Pluto (and Titan) are a boring uniform sepia.
To understand just how wrong it is to label these images as "true color", try the following experiment:
1: Find a nice colorful picture of, say, a rose garden.
2: On a satellite image, find the color-value of that rose garden at, say, a spatial resolution of 50km per pixel.
3: Take the color-value of that pixel -- which, on earth, will range from a muddy greyish-brown to a muddy greyish-blue -- and apply that hue to the entire image. You will now have a very sorry-looking rose-garden.
4: Release the image accompanied by a press release claiming that this is a "true-color" view of said rose-garden.
See the problem with this?
Honestly, the folks at NASA are geniuses, but they really need to stop doing this kind of thing. One thing they don't understand very well is human perception and psychology. If you show people a greyscale image, they will assume that it represents something which is actually more colorful, and their imagination can take it from there. On the other hand, if you show people an image which is colorised with a uniform color, they will assume that is the actual color -- especially if you've then gone on to tell them that it's a true-color image. In truth, it's no more "true-color" than the final image in the rose-garden experiment above. This, unfortunately, convinces people that they're looking at something far more drab than they actually are.
Tl;dr: Where NASA lacks actual color imagery, they really shouldn't colorise pictures with a uniform hue and then call them "true color". It's bordering on false to do so, and results in images which are much more drab than a simple black-and-white image would be, and possible much more drab than reality.
I think there's a case to be made even for "average hue applied to the whole image": it's very easy to look at a black and white planet photo and assume that the whole thing is made of grey rock (since our own familiar Moon is pretty close to exactly that). I made that mistake myself for quite a long time. So using the average hue is one step better than that, or at least no worse.
But my impression has been that they often do something more sophisticated: they have a high resolution greyscale image and a lower resolution color image (maybe just a few pixels, or maybe as much as half or a quarter of the greyscale resolution). Colorizing the higher resolution image using the lower one in that case seems entirely acceptable. (In fact, doesn't JPEG generally do something very similar for color images almost all the time?)
Do I have that wrong? Or is it just that NASA isn't good about reporting the relative resolution of the color component of their "true color" images? (That would be really nice, come to think of it: "This image of Enceladus has detail resolution 150x150 and color resolution 50x50.")
Agreed. A few years back I spent many hours with a telescope trying to find nebula in the sky.
Turns out nebula look like grey clouds, not like psychedelic posters.
I know this stuff makes for some really sexy press, but it doesn't do much help for the general public who has an interest in science but not much time to figure out what's real and what's not real.
By that standard everything you literally see is not "true color". Subsampled chroma is a property of all "color" information because that's the way your eyes actually work. This is a Hobgoblin's argument. Just complain that their chroma sampling is too coarse and put the pitchforks away please.
The problem is that people reasonably assume (and NASA's wording suggests) that the chroma sampling is as high resolution as the greyscale sampling. Hence, it's misleading.
Actually, I thought the black and white were the real colours until somebody pointed it out.
I really don't see the damage in releasing a sepia version of the picture. Why should I care that it's inaccurate? It's a postcard from the other end of the solar system.
The genius which goes into getting these images is astonishing, and I'm not meaning to disparage that at all! The damaging part is when they colorize an image and then call it "true color", when this is simply untrue.
And here's a "true-color" image of Earth, produced using the New Horizons / Huygens colorization technique of combining a greyscale image with very low-resolution color data: http://imgur.com/IOqOTyw.jpg
What's wrong with this? A.) It flat-out isn't "true-color", and NASA shouldn't be spreading inaccurate information, and B.) It's arguably a more boring image than the greyscale original (http://imgur.com/hwYA6VK.jpg), which leaves one better able to imagine possible color schemes, rather than fixating one upon a single, inaccurate, and very boring color scheme.
Thanks you make a distinction and the pics really drive home your point. I guess the problem is the label 'true color' which has stuck for a long time to a refer to statistically determined hues. Maybe we should label 'actual true colors' as 'real color' in order to make the distinction. I suppose true color started out as a way to distinguish them from artistically rendered/painted images.
Well by that standard have we ever seen anything in true color? Could you not make the same argument for our own eyes based on the differences in color down at the atomic level?
Yes, you are. NASA is not picking one color here applying a filter to the entire image as you seem to be implying. They are doing their best with the data available from multiple instruments to determine what the color of each pixel should be. It is a lot more intricate a process than you make out.
There are some bad color filter stories from NASA (such as making Mars surface photos look more like an Earth desert with blue skies than you would actually think if you were there). But this is not a case of that.
Astro-noob here. Why can't we get better pictures from our telescopes, given that we can take what seems to be high quality pictures of things much further away? Is it because of how "small" pluto is, versus say a large galaxy or nebula.
It is exactly that: Pluto is a very tiny astronomical object. Galaxies, nebulae, and such are much further away than Pluto, but that is more than made up for by how mind-boggingly large they are. For example, The Andromeda Galaxy is about six full moons wide as viewed from Earth[1].
It's kind of a shame humanity evolved in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way.
If we'd evolved in one of the Magellanic Clouds, we'd see an astounding squashed spiral view of this galaxy with direct line of sight of the bright nucleus.
Meanwhile if there are life forms in Magellanic Clouds they are probably looking at the spiral arms thinking that it is a shame that they did not evolve in a galaxy proper...
I'm still amazed we knew about its existence any time prior, the best picture we had in may is just 9 pixels wide. There's more visual information in Google's favicon.
Those represent our previous best information about the surface of Pluto, but they're not individual photos -- they're composite reconstructions from a number of different images taken over a long period of time, as the planet rotated.
> The Hubble images are a few pixels wide. But through a technique called dithering, multiple, slightly offset pictures can be combined through computer-image processing to synthesize a higher-resolution view than could be seen in a single exposure. "This has taken four years and 20 computers operating continuously and simultaneously to accomplish," says Buie, who developed special algorithms to sharpen the Hubble data.
This isn't talked about more often but its kinda funny. During roughly the American Revolution there were 10 planets.
Neptune/Pluto weren't yet discovered. Instead we had Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, George (Uranus), Ceres, Vesta, and several other minor asteroids.
Wow. So many downvotes. You guys must really hate pluto. Fyi. Definition is from iau. Earth would also fall under same criteria if it was further than neptune...
It amazes me that we humans have made something that has travelled over seven billion kilometers in cold dark emptiness and sends us highly detailed photographs of things we have never seen before.
Use the abbreviated form of a title without explanation only if there is no chance of any misunderstanding (eg UN, Nato, IRA, BBC). Otherwise, spell it out in full at first reference, or introduce a label (eg the public sector union Unite).
Where you would normally pronounce the abbreviation as a string of letters - an initialism - use all capitals with no full stops or spaces (eg FA, UNHCR, NUT). However, our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Aids, Farc, Eta, Nafta, Nasa, Opec, Apec).
That's apparently correct British usage. From The Guardian Style Guide:[1]
"Use all capitals if an abbreviation is pronounced as the individual letters (an initialism): BBC, CEO, US, VAT, etc; if it is an acronym (pronounced as a word) spell out with initial capital, eg Nasa, Nato, Unicef, unless it can be considered to have entered the language as an everyday word, such as awol, laser and, more recently, asbo, pin number and sim card."
We do, but every now and then someone will pronounce it as 'vat rhymes with fat', so it's also understood. On the TV it's almost always pronounced as an acronym.
> Where you would normally pronounce the abbreviation as a string of letters - an initialism - use all capitals with no full stops or spaces (eg FA, UNHCR, NUT). However, our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Aids, Farc, Eta, Nafta, Nasa, Opec, Apec).
What I find interesting is how few craters there are compared to other planets (yes I know pluto is no longer a planet). Does this reflect that meteor bombardment is rare in the outer solar system, or that there is some sort of geological process going on that is removing craters?
Initial interpretation of the first image apparently suggested an active (geologically speaking) surface. This would tend to remove visible craters. Think Venus (highly active surface) vs the Moon.
I'm not sure. I did wonder about this interpretation myself. It does not make much sense in terms our understanding of tectonics (or lack thereof) for other bodies in the solar system.
Would it be so round were this the case? I assumed it would take a long time for gravity to make a planet's surface round, much longer than it would take to accumulate a bunch of impact craters.
It would be rounded almost instantly. In an impact of that size -- almost exactly comparable to the impact which created the Earth-Moon system -- the surface of Pluto would have been heated so extensively as to become molton rock.
It seems strange that the highest ranked story about Pluto for the past few days has been from BBC not NASA. Check out www.nasa.gov for the original press release and updates as they come in.
I assume that the probe is travelling in a straight line? I also assume that each planet is busily orbiting the sun. How on earth (pardon the pun) did they work out the exact speed the probe should travel at (I also assume it accelerates) in order to fly past each planet and moon at exactly the right point of time and space?
The short version is - for the most part these trajectories can be calculated with a decent degree of accuracy with relatively simple equations. Rocket engines tend to give acceleration in short bursts (which simplifies the computations a lot as well), so New Horizons was launched out of Earth orbit at about 16km/s and since then has only fired its own engines for short correction burns.
Simple ballistics. The probe is still subject to gravity and it can receive trajectory adjustments as needed. It's not like it was launched ten years ago and then it was on its own: it's been piloted remotely from the Earth as necessary.
It's a remarkable achievement but the science behind it has been known and used successfully for decades.
I believe tomorrow we get a higher-resolution Charon and a similar resolution picture of Pluto. The incredible Emily Lakdawalla has a full list of what's coming when:
That's an interesting idea. On one hand I would think that something intelligent living with that little energy available per square meter would operate very slowly, such that we could communicate with it like a correspondence chess game. However, on the other hand that it alternates between pretty different climates every 250 years suggest the type of pressures that lead to different eras in Earth's history where life was predominantly smaller or more 'simple' before becoming bigger and more complex again. Maybe at low temperatures though, 250 years is a short hibernation.
I was actually thinking of the evidence of tectonic forces, too. Like a long inhale and exhale collected by the mass of the body and realized at the borders of geologic transformation every plutonic year? There's something beautiful about the image.
An even more exotic arrangement, beyond electrochemical processes, to somehow 'metabolize' matter directly into energy would exceed the definition of life in my opinion, as though it would be life 2.0 or something, and also have a pretty fascinating impact on the universe.
Anecdotally, I've seen it quite a bit in mainstream news. It was ~ the first or second teased story on NBC nightly news, and they spent some time on it yesterday, as well.
Perhaps one might wish there were more, but I have seen numerous stories in the mainstream press. In fact, I missed my subway stop this morning reading a very good article about NH in the New York Times.
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https://twitter.com/tothur/status/620601134651166720/photo/1