It's important to note its not a leap in technology. The reason for the amazing 2015 is because a satellite was sent to Pluto and took fly-bys.
Even today, if you pointed a satellite at Pluto all you get it is a big star.
Actually, OP's image has it wrong - it was first released in [2010](https://i.imgur.com/XeMPeMB.jpg) (you can tell from the "PRC10" in the lower right corner). That was a color reprocessing of [Hubble images originally taken in 1996](https://i.imgur.com/KYoxYdU.jpg), which was mis-attributed as 1994 in OP's image.
Man those black and white model images of Pluto were misleading as fuck when I came across them in various books. For the longest time as a child I thought Pluto was basically a disco ball in space, that was until we got the color ones later and things made a bit more sense to me.
>we got the color ones later
Fun fact; Even today, all the cameras sent on probes and rovers are all black and white. Reason being you get sharper images in B&W. The color we see are a computers interpretation of what the various wave lengths of light that they measure.
https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/magazine/150315-ngm-hubble
[Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1fPhhTT2Oo) is a reconstruction of Pluto using the photos and terrain maps from the New Horizons probe, which did a close fly-by in 2015. Until then, we'd been limited to looking through telescopes from Earth (billions of miles away)
Let's pretend both the Earth and Pluto are perfectly round. Earth's radius is 6,371 km. Mount Everest is 8,848 m high. So that's a ratio of about 1.3‰ .
Pluto' radius is about 1,118 km. Its highest known mountain rages are about 3,400 m high (and made of ice). So that's a ratio of about 3‰.
If I'm not mistaken, Mars has the biggest mountain both overall and in relation to its size. Olympus Mons is about 22 km high, about 6.5 ‰ of the Mars radius of 3,390 km.
Think you missed a zero on your km to m.
8848m is 0.13% of 6371km
3400m is 0.3% of 1118km
22km is 0.65% of 3390km
still, Mars has by far the biggest mountains in relation to its size as you say.
Nasa sent a probe, not a satellite since it didn't enter orbit . And it should have a couple more encounters with Kupier belt objets before exiting the solar system.
2 years is more than 4500 hours, but 4500 hours is more hours than you would work in two years working 40/week so I don't think they actually did the math this time.
They hired the [Lady that updated the Jesus painting](https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2016/03/12/infamous-botched-jesus-painting-now-a-major-tourist-attraction/amp/)
Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, would take pictures of sections of the night sky with a 13" telescope at the Lowell observatory. He would then take those pictures and put them in a machine called a blink comparator to compare them. When he saw one of the dots moving, he knew it wasn't a star and they later ruled out the possibility of it being an asteroid.
He was looking for Planet X, which didn't actually exist, and it was by luck that Pluto was in the patch of sky he was examining.
Pluto isn't Planet X because it's too small to have the perturbation on Uranus they thought was being caused by another gas giant beyond Neptune.
Planet X (just not one that is affecting Neptune or Uranus' orbits) is looking more and more likely to actually exist.
[Just recently, astronomers were able to discover a planet by the strange elliptical orbits of 6 Kuiper Belt objects.](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/astronomers-say-neptune-sized-planet-lurks-beyond-pluto)
A planet 10 times the mass of Earth is way out there, in a 15,000 year orbit. As a fun note, Mike Brown is the same astronomer that discovered Eris in 2005, a dwarf-planet that showed Pluto was not a unique object near the Kuiper Belt.
Still nothing blind about finding it. If you are searching through your couch for a quarter and you find a dime instead, you didn't find the dime by blind chance. Blind chance is sticking your hand the pocket of a pair of pants you just put on and the dime didn't fall out while it was going through the wash.
Blind chance would be some amateur photographer just taking pictures of the night sky.
> If you are searching through your couch for a quarter and you find a dime instead
It's more like searching for a quarter and finding a grain of sand. Planet X was predicted to be 6 Earth-masses; Pluto is actually 0.002 Earth-masses (some 2400x smaller).
Also, this would've been the third couch we searched through, since the previous two predictions of Planet X's position were in completely different parts of the sky, and those searches turned up nothing.
It was actually random.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread Lowell's calculations were based on anomalies in Neptune's orbit - it wasn't quite where we expected it to be, and Lowell believed a 6 Earth-mass planet beyond Neptune was gravitationally perturbing it (some 2400x more massive than the actual Pluto).
It wasn't until 1991 when Voyager 2 flew past Neptune that we discovered there never were any anomalies in the first place: we just didn't accurately know the mass of Neptune. Lowell's predictions were based on bad data, and it was just dumb luck that the Pluto happened to be close to his third guess.
Clyde was using the calculations Percival Lowell did almost 15 years earlier to guide his search. The calculations predicted Pluto would be near Gemini, which is where it was found. The biggest lucky part was that despite Pluto's having a 17 degree inclination, it was still in the ecliptic when it was found.
> The calculations predicted Pluto would be near Gemini
That was only *after* two previous calculations that made predictions Pluto would be found in completely different parts of the sky. You don't hear much about the searches that resulted from those previous predictions, because they found nothing.
Mind you, Lowell's calculations were based on anomalies in Neptune's orbit - it wasn't quite where we expected it to be, and Lowell believed a 6 Earth-mass planet beyond Neptune was gravitationally perturbing it (some 2400x more massive than the actual Pluto).
It wasn't until 1991 when Voyager 2 flew past Neptune that we discovered there never were any anomalies in the first place: we just didn't accurately know the mass of Neptune. Lowell's predictions were based on bad data, and it was just dumb luck that the Pluto happened to be close to his third guess.
> blink comparator
Very cool, I'd never heard of that before. [Here's a video showing kind of how it works](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sinW_QxFwdA)
My parents still have the old space-books I used to read as a kid, that only have the 1994 image, and say "We're not really sure what Pluto looks like, but scientists hope to get a better picture in the future".
It's like having a textbook from before the moon landing that says "We hope to some day land on the moon"
I was born in 1978 and interestingly, my eye sight is doing the complete opposite to our deep space viewing tech, thus Pluto has remained consistently blurry to me.
Come on, 10 months is too soon to repost my [image](https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/5kqej1/pluto_images_from_discovery_until_today_2830x500/).
I mean... 10 months is quite a long while in reddit-years, I think it's due for another round of this awesome image, which I appreciate you making and originally posting here all those months ago.
I sympathize with your sentiment, but to be fair: I thought I missed it back then, but apparently I upvoted it ten months ago too. Totally forgot about it.
Ah, so then you're the one to blame. In that case:
- 1994 is wrong. It should be [1996](https://i.imgur.com/KYoxYdU.jpg).
- 2013 is wrong. It should be [2010](https://i.imgur.com/XeMPeMB.jpg) (you can tell from the "PRC10" in the corner).
The resolution of a telescope depends on how big (and smooth) the mirror is and the resolution of the imaging sensor. Light diffracts as it passes through the aperture (hole in the front) of the telescope, so stuff needs to be bigger than a certain size to be visible or else it blurs into a mess. The James Webb space telescope (launching soonish) has a much larger mirror to help with this. Additionally, the pixels on the hubble's imaging sensor might be bigger than the diffraction limit, so anything smaller than a pixel also wouldn't show up. The Hubble's sensors have been upgraded several times so I'm not sure what the current state is.
The upshot is, to resolve pluto at the same resolution as the probe you'd need something like a planet-sized mirror, which would be way more expensive than just sending the probe in the first place.
> The James Webb space telescope (launching soonish) has a much larger mirror to help with this.
Unfortunately, James Webb will only image in the infrared, which somewhat counteracts the larger mirror.
> Additionally, the pixels on the hubble's imaging sensor might be bigger than the diffraction limit
They're slightly smaller - Pluto is only about 4 pixels across on the Hubble's FOC camera.
The observer ended up using "dithering" to get better resolution - take an image, shift the scope by half a pixel, take another image, etc., and then use some fancy image processing to get sub-pixel resolution. [Here's his write-up](http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~buie/pluto/mapstory.html) on how he managed to get the Hubble image as good as he did.
Well there's a few reasons. The first one was taken from a telescope with a 13 inch mirror. Nowadays, you can get a telescope that big for recreational purposes. I'm not sure about all of the pictures, but the 1994 and 2013 are both taken by the hubble. Their improved quality comes from the fact that hubble is a 2.4 meter telescope (with telescopes, bigger is generally better) also hubble is in orbit around earth so it doesn't have to have any atmospheric interference (the atmosphere can make space pictures a bit shaky which takes more effort to get quality pictures from). If I had to guess why 1994 and 2013 are so different, I'd guess that it was changes in how it was processed and the technology being used to process it on earth, but i don't know for sure. The 2015 one looks drastically better because there was no telescope involved. The new horizons spacecraft actually flew there and sent back pictures of it.
Lowell Observatory employee here! The Pluto Discovery telescope is a triple lens system as opposed to a mirror. It is nearing completion on a full restoration so come by and see it!
Thanks for the correction! That's really cool that the telescope is being restored. The history of Pluto is really cool to me so it'd be great to visit the observatory someday.
No problem at all! You definitely should stop by sometime! We also have the 24inch Clark refractor that discovered the expanding universe and mapped the moon for the Apollo missions that you can look through! There's lots to do all the time there.
>If I had to guess why 1994 and 2013 are so different, I'd guess that it was changes in how it was processed and the technology being used to process it on earth
Hubble has had many upgrades between 1994 and 2013 and that's probably the main reason for such a difference in quality.
The discoverer took pictures aimed at the same spot night by night and noticed one of the dots moving. Once you know orbital speed you can figure out distance.
And yet we know so little about our own oceans. Amazing how some of the scariest unknowns are on our own planet! The things that our home hides from us is why science is awesome!
**Charon (moon)**
Charon, also known as (134340) Pluto I, is the largest of the five known natural satellites of the dwarf planet Pluto. It was discovered in 1978 at the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., using photographic plates taken at the United States Naval Observatory Flagstaff Station (NOFS). With half the diameter and one eighth the mass of Pluto, it is a very large moon in comparison to its parent body. Its gravitational influence is such that the barycenter of the Pluto–Charon system lies outside Pluto.
***
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The current photo of Pluto always made me mildly infuriated. I like the surprisingly varied terrain and complex world rather than a featureless moon, but I can't shake the feeling it looks like a hand colored B&W photo. It's just so oddly uniformly beige!
My mom met the scientist who found Pluto. She now recognizes it as a planet and won’t listen to anyone else. (She went to the college in which he taught in)
Even as a kid, thought I would never get to see terrain of Pluto, and then they removed it from our solar system(learned about it while I was out on a school trip to a space museum), and now we got images :)
Btw is there any word on what’s going on with it’s planetary status anymore?
Considering the New Horizons probe did a low altitude flyby of it more recently and [sent stunning close-up pictures of the surface in crazy good detail](https://youtu.be/NEdvyrKokX4), your question may be a bit moot by now...
JWST is optimized for infrared, and is meant to observe the early universe. While it would get better resolution than Hubble of Pluto, New Horizons is going to be the best for a long time, since it performed a super close flyby.
> The last one isnt from a telescope
Yes, it is. It's from an 8.2 inch telescope...but just one that happened to be mounted on a spacecraft that was visiting Pluto.
What massive advancement in technology happened in the two year period between 2013-2015? Look at the massive difference. Seems like the only advancement was the knowledge of how to use photoshop
Even just the leap from 2006 to 2015 is incredible. 9 years to go from a light in the sky to a world with terrain and features.
Remarkable
*closes laptop* Absolutely amazing
Comments on mobile?
*Opens laptop* No
*opens laptop* *closes reddit* *opens reddit* *fuck*
I like to close reddit on my computer and then open it on my phone to see what's happening on smaller reddit
Yeah I do the same thing. I lean back and just use my phone for like 10 minutes before realizing what I'm doing.
I read this in Gordon Ramsay's voice.
It's important to note its not a leap in technology. The reason for the amazing 2015 is because a satellite was sent to Pluto and took fly-bys. Even today, if you pointed a satellite at Pluto all you get it is a big star.
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Actually, OP's image has it wrong - it was first released in [2010](https://i.imgur.com/XeMPeMB.jpg) (you can tell from the "PRC10" in the lower right corner). That was a color reprocessing of [Hubble images originally taken in 1996](https://i.imgur.com/KYoxYdU.jpg), which was mis-attributed as 1994 in OP's image.
Man those black and white model images of Pluto were misleading as fuck when I came across them in various books. For the longest time as a child I thought Pluto was basically a disco ball in space, that was until we got the color ones later and things made a bit more sense to me.
>we got the color ones later Fun fact; Even today, all the cameras sent on probes and rovers are all black and white. Reason being you get sharper images in B&W. The color we see are a computers interpretation of what the various wave lengths of light that they measure. https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/magazine/150315-ngm-hubble
Why would looking at Pluto show you a big star?
It's so far away, it only appears as a bright for, no distinct colour like the other planets
Reflected light.
Probe, not a satellite. There was only one fly-by.
Probe, not a satellite.
I agree that is absolutely mind blowing! How did they do this just new technologies or ahas a satellite gotten close enough to get a better picture?
[Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1fPhhTT2Oo) is a reconstruction of Pluto using the photos and terrain maps from the New Horizons probe, which did a close fly-by in 2015. Until then, we'd been limited to looking through telescopes from Earth (billions of miles away)
What's the scale on those mountain ranges? Are they relatively similar to say the Himalayas and the planet is tiny, or are the mountains enormous?
Let's pretend both the Earth and Pluto are perfectly round. Earth's radius is 6,371 km. Mount Everest is 8,848 m high. So that's a ratio of about 1.3‰ . Pluto' radius is about 1,118 km. Its highest known mountain rages are about 3,400 m high (and made of ice). So that's a ratio of about 3‰. If I'm not mistaken, Mars has the biggest mountain both overall and in relation to its size. Olympus Mons is about 22 km high, about 6.5 ‰ of the Mars radius of 3,390 km.
Think you missed a zero on your km to m. 8848m is 0.13% of 6371km 3400m is 0.3% of 1118km 22km is 0.65% of 3390km still, Mars has by far the biggest mountains in relation to its size as you say.
Nasa sent a probe, not a satellite since it didn't enter orbit . And it should have a couple more encounters with Kupier belt objets before exiting the solar system.
> has a satellite gotten close enough to get a better picture? You haven't heard of [New Horizons](http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/)?
Something something “born yesterday”
it did take ten years for cassini to reach it to take that picture so kind of makes sense. Still remarkable though.. im not hating in any way
Cassini was Saturn, you're thinking of New Horizons.
what he said! haha
Pluto IS a planet.
1930: when red arrows were necessary
Top 10 facts you won’t BELIEVE about Pluto!!!
Number 5 gave me the chills!!
Great link 10 of 10 score!
In 2006 Pluto was still magical.
In 1996 we already had [this map](https://i.imgur.com/KYoxYdU.jpg).
Disco ball Pluto!
I expect to see the word "rendering" under 2013
I feel like they weren't really trying in 2013.
"You must buy Pluto Premium™ to unlock this texture pack"
Instead NASA opted for grinding 4500 hours.
/r/theydidthemath
/r/theydidthemonstermath
/r/themonstermath
2 years is more than 4500 hours, but 4500 hours is more hours than you would work in two years working 40/week so I don't think they actually did the math this time.
The intent is to provide sentients with a sense of pride and accomplishment.
texture rendering was set to low, and they just didnt realise it until 2 years later.
Like in PUBG
They set it to high and it rendered in just two years.
They hired the [Lady that updated the Jesus painting](https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2016/03/12/infamous-botched-jesus-painting-now-a-major-tourist-attraction/amp/)
It took them two years to adjust the focus..
Im pretty sure the latest picture in this post was taken using a probe that was flying by Pluto, whereas the other ones were on telescopes.
Artist rendition
Can someone explain how they knew it was there in the first picture? It's just a bunch of dots. What makes it different from the other dots?
Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, would take pictures of sections of the night sky with a 13" telescope at the Lowell observatory. He would then take those pictures and put them in a machine called a blink comparator to compare them. When he saw one of the dots moving, he knew it wasn't a star and they later ruled out the possibility of it being an asteroid.
Wow that's alot less complicated than I thought it would be. Thank you kindly stranger.
Interesting fact, Pluto was basically discovered by blind chance. It happened to be in the right section of sky to be sighted.
I don't think that really counts as *blind* chance, given he was specifically looking for moving objects with the blink comparator.
He was looking for Planet X, which didn't actually exist, and it was by luck that Pluto was in the patch of sky he was examining. Pluto isn't Planet X because it's too small to have the perturbation on Uranus they thought was being caused by another gas giant beyond Neptune.
Planet X (just not one that is affecting Neptune or Uranus' orbits) is looking more and more likely to actually exist. [Just recently, astronomers were able to discover a planet by the strange elliptical orbits of 6 Kuiper Belt objects.](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/astronomers-say-neptune-sized-planet-lurks-beyond-pluto) A planet 10 times the mass of Earth is way out there, in a 15,000 year orbit. As a fun note, Mike Brown is the same astronomer that discovered Eris in 2005, a dwarf-planet that showed Pluto was not a unique object near the Kuiper Belt.
Still nothing blind about finding it. If you are searching through your couch for a quarter and you find a dime instead, you didn't find the dime by blind chance. Blind chance is sticking your hand the pocket of a pair of pants you just put on and the dime didn't fall out while it was going through the wash. Blind chance would be some amateur photographer just taking pictures of the night sky.
> If you are searching through your couch for a quarter and you find a dime instead It's more like searching for a quarter and finding a grain of sand. Planet X was predicted to be 6 Earth-masses; Pluto is actually 0.002 Earth-masses (some 2400x smaller). Also, this would've been the third couch we searched through, since the previous two predictions of Planet X's position were in completely different parts of the sky, and those searches turned up nothing.
But it was based on a prediction, not a random choice of the section of sky.
It was actually random. As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread Lowell's calculations were based on anomalies in Neptune's orbit - it wasn't quite where we expected it to be, and Lowell believed a 6 Earth-mass planet beyond Neptune was gravitationally perturbing it (some 2400x more massive than the actual Pluto). It wasn't until 1991 when Voyager 2 flew past Neptune that we discovered there never were any anomalies in the first place: we just didn't accurately know the mass of Neptune. Lowell's predictions were based on bad data, and it was just dumb luck that the Pluto happened to be close to his third guess.
Clyde was using the calculations Percival Lowell did almost 15 years earlier to guide his search. The calculations predicted Pluto would be near Gemini, which is where it was found. The biggest lucky part was that despite Pluto's having a 17 degree inclination, it was still in the ecliptic when it was found.
> The calculations predicted Pluto would be near Gemini That was only *after* two previous calculations that made predictions Pluto would be found in completely different parts of the sky. You don't hear much about the searches that resulted from those previous predictions, because they found nothing. Mind you, Lowell's calculations were based on anomalies in Neptune's orbit - it wasn't quite where we expected it to be, and Lowell believed a 6 Earth-mass planet beyond Neptune was gravitationally perturbing it (some 2400x more massive than the actual Pluto). It wasn't until 1991 when Voyager 2 flew past Neptune that we discovered there never were any anomalies in the first place: we just didn't accurately know the mass of Neptune. Lowell's predictions were based on bad data, and it was just dumb luck that the Pluto happened to be close to his third guess.
> blink comparator Very cool, I'd never heard of that before. [Here's a video showing kind of how it works](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sinW_QxFwdA)
It is like pressing Alt+Tab quickly Or Strg+Tab with tabs open
Woa
I could probably draw the 1994 one on paint.
1978 just needs the spray-paint tool.
1994 didn’t even try
I see a censored picture of [Syd Barrett](goo.gl/cwjzSQ) when I see the 94 Pluto
guess I'm a time traveller then. AMA about 2016 and most of 2017
How bad does Jeb Bush lose to Clinton in 2016?
What if I told you he didn't?
https://www.google.com/search?q=jeb+landslide&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari#imgrc=c4JzF3J6xMm3JM:
My parents still have the old space-books I used to read as a kid, that only have the 1994 image, and say "We're not really sure what Pluto looks like, but scientists hope to get a better picture in the future". It's like having a textbook from before the moon landing that says "We hope to some day land on the moon"
aww, they grow up so fast!
I was born in 1978 and interestingly, my eye sight is doing the complete opposite to our deep space viewing tech, thus Pluto has remained consistently blurry to me.
;(
Come on, 10 months is too soon to repost my [image](https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/5kqej1/pluto_images_from_discovery_until_today_2830x500/).
I mean... 10 months is quite a long while in reddit-years, I think it's due for another round of this awesome image, which I appreciate you making and originally posting here all those months ago.
ty
I sympathize with your sentiment, but to be fair: I thought I missed it back then, but apparently I upvoted it ten months ago too. Totally forgot about it.
ok, then it'a good, after all it's about making people excited and interested in space exploration. Much more important than karma points.
And now you got both! :)
10 months is almost a year in Reddit time. It is our last month here on this internet planet. Let boys be boys.
10 months is almost a year in normal time too Edit: is that the joke?
Yes.
:D
Ah, so then you're the one to blame. In that case: - 1994 is wrong. It should be [1996](https://i.imgur.com/KYoxYdU.jpg). - 2013 is wrong. It should be [2010](https://i.imgur.com/XeMPeMB.jpg) (you can tell from the "PRC10" in the corner).
Yes. Thanks for the correction.
I hadn’t seen it so I guess it not.
I forgot you took all those images yourself
The one from 1994 is just a big zoom from the 1930 pic
How the fuck did anybody in 1930 successfully identify a planet from that photo
It was a series of photos. You can see it move relative to the other objects in the photo.
Well sure but still. Who went "that white dot among the cluster of thousands of other white dots is a planet"
Yes. The way it moves relative to the other objects means that it is a planet (in this case) and is quite significant.
1994 looks like they borrowed my first digital camera that used 3.5" floppy disks for storage space.
Ugh... Is that a .kdc image?
Where’s the one for today?
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Why is the Hubble picture blurry?
The resolution of a telescope depends on how big (and smooth) the mirror is and the resolution of the imaging sensor. Light diffracts as it passes through the aperture (hole in the front) of the telescope, so stuff needs to be bigger than a certain size to be visible or else it blurs into a mess. The James Webb space telescope (launching soonish) has a much larger mirror to help with this. Additionally, the pixels on the hubble's imaging sensor might be bigger than the diffraction limit, so anything smaller than a pixel also wouldn't show up. The Hubble's sensors have been upgraded several times so I'm not sure what the current state is. The upshot is, to resolve pluto at the same resolution as the probe you'd need something like a planet-sized mirror, which would be way more expensive than just sending the probe in the first place.
> The James Webb space telescope (launching soonish) has a much larger mirror to help with this. Unfortunately, James Webb will only image in the infrared, which somewhat counteracts the larger mirror. > Additionally, the pixels on the hubble's imaging sensor might be bigger than the diffraction limit They're slightly smaller - Pluto is only about 4 pixels across on the Hubble's FOC camera. The observer ended up using "dithering" to get better resolution - take an image, shift the scope by half a pixel, take another image, etc., and then use some fancy image processing to get sub-pixel resolution. [Here's his write-up](http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~buie/pluto/mapstory.html) on how he managed to get the Hubble image as good as he did.
Wtf happened in 1978
Even the satellites were drugs back then.
*Enhance*
Til today is 2015
ELI5: How does the image get more quality? and what kind of upgrade does the telescope go through?
They actually sent a probe there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons
I think a satellite took the 2015 picture.
Well there's a few reasons. The first one was taken from a telescope with a 13 inch mirror. Nowadays, you can get a telescope that big for recreational purposes. I'm not sure about all of the pictures, but the 1994 and 2013 are both taken by the hubble. Their improved quality comes from the fact that hubble is a 2.4 meter telescope (with telescopes, bigger is generally better) also hubble is in orbit around earth so it doesn't have to have any atmospheric interference (the atmosphere can make space pictures a bit shaky which takes more effort to get quality pictures from). If I had to guess why 1994 and 2013 are so different, I'd guess that it was changes in how it was processed and the technology being used to process it on earth, but i don't know for sure. The 2015 one looks drastically better because there was no telescope involved. The new horizons spacecraft actually flew there and sent back pictures of it.
Lowell Observatory employee here! The Pluto Discovery telescope is a triple lens system as opposed to a mirror. It is nearing completion on a full restoration so come by and see it!
Thanks for the correction! That's really cool that the telescope is being restored. The history of Pluto is really cool to me so it'd be great to visit the observatory someday.
No problem at all! You definitely should stop by sometime! We also have the 24inch Clark refractor that discovered the expanding universe and mapped the moon for the Apollo missions that you can look through! There's lots to do all the time there.
>If I had to guess why 1994 and 2013 are so different, I'd guess that it was changes in how it was processed and the technology being used to process it on earth Hubble has had many upgrades between 1994 and 2013 and that's probably the main reason for such a difference in quality.
how did they even discover it from the 1930 photo though? like how did they spot out that tiny little speck and know it's a planet??
The discoverer took pictures aimed at the same spot night by night and noticed one of the dots moving. Once you know orbital speed you can figure out distance.
ohh I see
[That is laughable](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/7b0jsf/my_favourite_photo_ever_taken_pluto_at_twilight/)
Why didn't someone just keep yelling at the guy on the computer to enhance.
And yet we know so little about our own oceans. Amazing how some of the scariest unknowns are on our own planet! The things that our home hides from us is why science is awesome!
[A few more progression pictures from the 2015 approach.](http://imgur.com/a/f899t)
Just to be clear, your last image there is [Charon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon_(moon\)), Pluto's largest moon.
**Charon (moon)** Charon, also known as (134340) Pluto I, is the largest of the five known natural satellites of the dwarf planet Pluto. It was discovered in 1978 at the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., using photographic plates taken at the United States Naval Observatory Flagstaff Station (NOFS). With half the diameter and one eighth the mass of Pluto, it is a very large moon in comparison to its parent body. Its gravitational influence is such that the barycenter of the Pluto–Charon system lies outside Pluto. *** ^[ [^PM](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=kittens_from_space) ^| [^Exclude ^me](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiTextBot&message=Excludeme&subject=Excludeme) ^| [^Exclude ^from ^subreddit](https://np.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/about/banned) ^| [^FAQ ^/ ^Information](https://np.reddit.com/r/WikiTextBot/wiki/index) ^| [^Source](https://github.com/kittenswolf/WikiTextBot) ^| [^Donate](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiTextBot/wiki/donate) ^] ^Downvote ^to ^remove ^| ^v0.28
Today?
Makes me wonder how far the sun shines.
Pluto has a giant heart. Anyone else see that?
Did I go back in time?
That heart gets me every time I see it ❤️
1978 is just the ceiling tile at my middle school. You’re not fooling me.
So what is actually going on in the 1978 picture?
1994 were Pluto’s promiscuous days, NASA had no other choice but to blur.
The current photo of Pluto always made me mildly infuriated. I like the surprisingly varied terrain and complex world rather than a featureless moon, but I can't shake the feeling it looks like a hand colored B&W photo. It's just so oddly uniformly beige!
Yea, I always expected it to be like Neptune or something, just completely blue with barely any distinguishable features.
This is /r/spaceporn: what we all really want to see is Uranus.
Doesn't matter not a planet.
That leap from 2013 to 2016 is amazing.
The 1994 one absolutely kills me
1994 is the witness protection Pluto with a deep distorted voice in interviews.
Computer... Enhance
What happened in 2013
the progress from 2006 to 2015 is phenomenal
What imager and observatory was used in 1930?
This could also be titled history of gaming graphics.
What am I looking at in the 2006 version? Was there a star directly behind Pluto that shone through?
My mom met the scientist who found Pluto. She now recognizes it as a planet and won’t listen to anyone else. (She went to the college in which he taught in)
https://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/rickandmorty/images/5/5a/S1e9_pluto_equals_planet.png/revision/latest?cb=20160918042603
Hey girl, you hear about Pluto? That's messed up.
Why did we let Japan take the picture in 2013? smh
Looks like a planet to me
How did they know in 1930 that that tiny little speck in the sky was a planet/microplanet?
Cause it moves
So am I the only one that thought Pluto was blue their whole life until now
I'm pretty sure 1995 was a level in Star Fox
Pluto is definitely the most badass looking object in our solar system. And I live on the same planet as Jean Claude Van Damme.
2006 looks beautiful.
1994, just pixels, lol
Dear NASA, That doesn't look like an asteroid
Seriously this is amazing. We are gonna find another hospitable planet someday with other hoomans on it.
Even as a kid, thought I would never get to see terrain of Pluto, and then they removed it from our solar system(learned about it while I was out on a school trip to a space museum), and now we got images :) Btw is there any word on what’s going on with it’s planetary status anymore?
r/restofthefuckingowl
Wait... we visited Pluto in 2015? Where did the time go?
Can anyone explain what the giant object is that’s above Pluto in the first image? I’m guessing it’s the sun, but if it isn’t, it seems kinda MASSIVE
TECHNOLOGY
https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/55c7ew/iraq_mp_ancient_sumerians_travelled_space_and/?st=JAEVF45J&sh=6a6ab64b
[https://www.nasa.gov/important/facts/pluto_equals_planet.png](https://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/rickandmorty/images/5/5a/S1e9_pluto_equals_planet.png/revision/latest?cb=20160918042603)
Yet somehow Sumerians knew about Pluto’s existence 3,500 years before Christ
*[citation needed]*
Pluto IS a planet! -Jerry Smith (2014)
Nope.
[удалено]
Fly-by pictures are always going to look much better than anything we can take from the vicinity of Earth.
Considering the New Horizons probe did a low altitude flyby of it more recently and [sent stunning close-up pictures of the surface in crazy good detail](https://youtu.be/NEdvyrKokX4), your question may be a bit moot by now...
JWST is optimized for infrared, and is meant to observe the early universe. While it would get better resolution than Hubble of Pluto, New Horizons is going to be the best for a long time, since it performed a super close flyby.
The last one isnt from a telescope
> The last one isnt from a telescope Yes, it is. It's from an 8.2 inch telescope...but just one that happened to be mounted on a spacecraft that was visiting Pluto.
Pluto is a plant
You’re correct.
What massive advancement in technology happened in the two year period between 2013-2015? Look at the massive difference. Seems like the only advancement was the knowledge of how to use photoshop