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Pluto Flyover from New Horizons

Pluto Flyover from New Horizons

14 comments

·May 18, 2025
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jauntywundrkind

Amazing video. But do note,

> Images from this spectacular passage have been color enhanced, vertically scaled, and digitally combined

I was quite surprised at the height of various features. Turns out yeah Pluto's not actually that wildly mountainous.

florbo

Just guessing here, but I think the vertical scaling might be for translating some of the top-down images they have. If you take a look at the photo below, Pluto appears to have pretty rough terrain. I didn't find anything about post-processing for this particular image, sorry in advance if I missed it.

https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA19947

petters

Thanks, those very, very big mountains made no sense to me. The radius of Pluto is more than 1000 km

behnamoh

I wish the video editing was done at Hollywood because damn it they have great CGI. I want an immersive experience with these space videos, and as soon as I notice low-quality simulated mountains/etc., the whole experience goes away.

somat

I like it, it presents a sort of integrity.

My thought process was, this is going to be the actual flyby of new horizons past pluto, no wait it's not, this is just a fake flyby. but look how coarse the heightmap is, they did not just sprinkle high density noise to make a better looking height map, they stuck with actual data, that's nice.

Honestly this is probably too charitable of me, with all the other liberties the author took with the data a high density heightmap was probably just considered not important, rather than some sort of moral highground.

dvh

NASA/JPL can do amazing videos, see Cassini's Grand Finale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrGAQCq9BMU

tectonic

That was made by Erik Wernquist, he's awesome. https://vimeo.com/erikwernquist

mmooss

Or at a good game studio. How an immersive NASA 'game' where you walk around (or fly around) Pluto, with or without realistic gravity? In VR?

calmbell

I highly recommend the book Chasing New Horizons to learn more about the New Horizons mission.

BurningFrog

Pluto is 40x further from the sun than Earth.

That means it gets 1/1600 (0.06%) as much sunlight as us.

I know the eye can adapt a lot to low light, but I doubt Pluto would look anywhere as bright to a human traveller as the video shows.

nahkoots

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude#List_of_app...

The sun on Pluto is only slightly dimmer than the sun on a very strongly overcast midday on Earth (about half as bright), but still much brighter (almost 200x) than a full moon.

BurningFrog

Thanks. That's better than I expected.

I'm now more optimistic for settling Jupiter's moons!

gitroom

man i could spend hours just watching stuff like this - pluto doesn't even feel real to me half the time. ever catch yourself wondering if we'll ever just get to walk around a world like that for real?

jmclnx

I am getting timeouts for the NASA Site, that never happened to me before. I guess DOGE strikes again :(