One day to go...

[davidc]

Launched in 2006, back when Pluto was still technically a planet*, the New Horizons space probe is now one day away from its closest approach to Pluto. It will be barrelling past it at 14 kilometres every SECOND, so won't be going into orbit, but it is already snapping the best ever pictures we've had. Because of the distance the probe is at it takes about 4.5 hours to receive data from the probe - this also means it will take sixteen months to fully retrieve all the data gathered during the flyby! And you thought your SD card readers were slow...

It will get much better very soon, but for now here's the best photo NASA has released. Sadly the forum won't allow posting a proper resolution image so here's a link. (maybe we should look into changing this?)

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/file ... otated.jpg

* it was reclassified 7 months after New Horizons launched to a dwarf planet, rather than being a full planet

[Mike Farley]

After Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft is heading off into the Kuiper Belt, which is one of the last parts of the Solar System mankind has yet to explore. It's going to be busy for quite a while.

[Peter Boughton]

Sadly the forum won't allow posting a proper resolution image

The image you posted appears to be an enlargement of the published images - within which Pluto occupies less than 200x200 at present - so it's not clear what benefit the larger resolution gives?

Being 1920x1080 it is probably designed as a desktop background for 16:9 monitors - it drops to 1330x784 after cropping out the large black padding, and reducing that by 1/3rd and taking the filesize down to 45KB doesn't affect quality significantly, so whilst the forum limits may or not be optimal, they're not really an issue here...

pluto-annotated.1024x768.jpg (45.28 KiB) Viewed 1972 times

[davidc]

It's because the forum limit stopped the image displaying directly. If the forum needed a 1024x768 limit for some reason it'd be nicer if it scaled a larger image down to fit, allowing click through to see the bigger one, and to allow 1024x on the longest edge rather than just the horizontal. Do you know if this is possible to do? Would seem to be the best balance to allow rendering of decent resolution images for sharing & critique.

[Mike Farley]

British technology was used to capture the images as New Horizons flew past Pluto.

http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/la ... aphs-56344