Astronomy Picture of the Day - Pluto at Night

NASA ^ | 16 Nov, 2024 | Image Credit: NASA, Johns Hopkins Univ./APL, Southwest Research Institute

[MtnClimber]

Explanation: The night side of Pluto spans this shadowy scene. In the stunning spacebased perspective the Sun is 4.9 billion kilometers (almost 4.5 light-hours) behind the dim and distant world. It was captured by far flung New Horizons in July of 2015 when the spacecraft was at a range of some 21,000 kilometers from Pluto, about 19 minutes after its closest approach. A denizen of the Kuiper Belt in dramatic silhouette, the image also reveals Pluto's tenuous, surprisingly complex layers of hazy atmosphere. Near the top of the frame the crescent twilight landscape includes southern areas of nitrogen ice plains now formally known as Sputnik Planitia and rugged mountains of water-ice in the Norgay Montes.

[MtnClimber]

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For more detail go to the link and click on the image for a high definition image. You can then move the magnifying glass cursor then click to zoom in and click again to zoom out. When zoomed in you can scan by moving the side bars on the bottom and right side of the image.

[MtnClimber]

[MtnClimber]

Pinging the APOD list

🪐 🌟 🌌 🍔

[Nateman]

Pluto. Roman God of the underworld. Plutonium, the element of death and destruction. As it turned out it was also the power source for the probe that took this picture.

[BenLurkin]

bttt

[AFB-XYZ]

Ooooooooooooooo. Pics of Pluto, no matter the distance or the angle, have always looked sort of menacing and foreboding to me.

One doesn’t wanna mess with Pluto. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is in deep doo-doo (he should be, anyway).

[No name given]

Eerie.

[SunkenCiv]

Whoa! Full sized image is huge!

[SkyDancer]

Also the name of Disney’s dog.

[Jamestown1630]

I’m no fan of Neil DeGrasse Tyson, but it was really Mike Brown who ‘killed’ Pluto.

[DannyTN]

"Whoa! Full sized image is huge!"

You should see it in person.

[DannyTN]

I look forward to robotic mining of plutonium on pluto.

[PROCON]

Here's an even clearer picture of Pluto at night. 😁

[ComputerGuy]

I liked things better back when he was a Planet. And stuff.

[central_va]

Isn’t Pluto friends with Uranus?

[Verginius Rufus]

Disney's Pluto was named after the planet was named, rather than vice versa, so the planet wasn't named after a cartoon character.

Some girl in England first suggested the name for the planet. That the first two letters were the initials of Percival Lowell, who started the search for the ninth planet, helped...the actual discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh, didn't get a lot of attention at first...just a farm boy from Kansas, not a member of one of the elite families of Boston.

[sit-rep]

kinda reminds me of the meme... “That face you make when the power goes out...” and there is just a black box...

[Lee'sGhost]

NTD is doo doo.

[SkyDancer]

Interesting.

[Verginius Rufus]

I got to hear Clyde Tombaugh give a talk about 35 years ago. He was pretty elderly by then but still very enthusiastic about his interest in astronomy. He did a lot besides discover Pluto.