Pluto video

[Theodore]

"Pluto through stained glass" sure is pretty. But did the folks on NASA's New Horizons team just feel like glitzing up their favorite dwarf planet for the holidays? No, of course not. In fact, this video is pretty special: It's the first actual video of Pluto's surface. Yes, we've seen "videos" from the July flyby before, but those were all created by zooming in on and sweeping over still images. This one is an honest-to-goodness moving picture, made from images taken about a half second apart.

LEISA, New Horizons’ infrared imaging spectrometer. LEISA's filter is designed to let in different wavelengths of light for each "slice" of the photo, from one side to another. This helps scientists study molecular variations on the surface of Pluto, since different molecules reflect different wavelengths of light - with no moving parts required.

[NASA releases the first batch of its sharpest images of Pluto]

LEISA measures infrared light, which humans can't actually see. But New Horizons scientist Alex Parker converted the color spectrum into a visible rainbow so we could get an idea of how LEISA works.

In a blog post, Parker explains that the video showed scientists that water ice is present on Pluto, and that a similar video of the moon Charon produced evidence of ammonia ice. But the video is cool, even for those of us who can't puzzle out the molecular signature of a particular patch of ice. This is the closest we'll get to a front-row seat to the Pluto flyby. In fact, you can even see the scene jiggle as New Horizons' thrusters fire to keep the little spacecraft on course.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-this-psychedelic-technicolor-video-of-pluto/

 

[bsman]

To New Horions: Your work is puerile and under-dramatized. You lack any sense of structure, character, and the Aristotilian unities.

 

[OGG]

Looks an awful lot like a planet to me. We're a presumptuous little species aren't we. We live on a tiny speck of dust in an infinite universe filled with objects immensely larger than our little star orbiting fluke, and yet we have the balls to pull the plug on Pluto and its rightful yet former place at the cool kids table.

One day, Jeff Goldblum won't be around to save us from the vastly superior beings that come to put us in our place.


Pluto will get the last fucking laugh as our remnants pass by in a cloud of debris hurtling away from our solar system at barely sub-light speed.

Who's the planet now bitch?

 

[LeftyTom]

I'm more interested in your videos of Uranus. hmy: