Astronomy Picture of the Day -- Pluto from above Cthulhu Regio

NASA ^ | September 14, 2015 | (see photo credit)

[SunkenCiv]

Explanation: New high resolution images of Pluto are starting to arrive from the outer Solar System. The robotic New Horizons spacecraft, which zoomed by Pluto in July, has finished sending back some needed engineering data and is now transmitting selections from its tremendous storehouse of images of Pluto and its moons. The featured image, a digital composite, details a surprising terrain filled with craters, plains, landscape of unknown character, and landforms that resemble something on Earth but are quite unexpected on Pluto. The light area sprawling across the upper right has been dubbed Sputnik Planum and is being studied for its unusual smoothness, while the dark cratered area just under the spacecraft is known as Cthulhu Regio. So far, New Horizons has only shared a few percent of the images and data it took during its Pluto flyby, but will continue to send back new views of the dwarf planet even as it glides outward toward even more distant explorations.

[SunkenCiv]

[Credit and Copyright: NASA, Johns Hopkins Univ./APL, Southwest Research Inst.]

[SunkenCiv]

The Big One

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[cripplecreek]

Metallica - The Call of Ktulu

[Salamander]

Yog Sothoth ping.

[Crazieman]

[GreenLanternCorps]

[Vaquero]

Dutch: You're one... *ugly* motherf****r!

[Nabber]

Out in the middle of nowhere, this planet/planetoid is just peppered with asteroid impact craters. Makes you think....

[BwanaNdege]

It has enough mass to make it spherical.

Orbits the Sun.

Sure looks like a PLANET to me!

[SunkenCiv]

Yup.

[xp38]

It orbits the sun but none of us will ever reach a Plutonian year in age. 1 Pluto orbit = 248 Earth orbits

[Gefn]

Cthulhu ping.

[JoeFromSidney]

Cthulhu for President. Why vote for the lesser evil?

[Slings and Arrows]

They’ve got to have the Mountains of Madness too.

[SunkenCiv]

I do wonder who had the idea to name it that way, regardless, it’s excellent — although that doesn’t solve the mystery of the location of Carcosa, since that planet has twin suns.