A friend sent me an AOL URL with six photos of Pluto that you can find at:
Note that the imprint of some of the stars is wider than Pluto; shows how very small the dwarf planet it, and how far away.
Getting old is interesting. I see that this story says that Charon was discovered THIRTY years ago! It sure doesn’t seem like it can have been that long. And it says “It is so far away that no clear pictures of it exist.” When I was a boy, that was true of all the planets, even Mars and Venus. But then, when I was a boy, dirt was only three years old.
‘Spectacular’ Images of Pluto Captured
Posted: 2007-10-13 21:55:50
Filed Under: Science News
Pluto, long called a planet, was downgraded last year to “dwarf planet” status by the International Astronomical Union. It is so far away that no clear pictures of it exist.
The new images are 20 times brighter than those taken of Pluto 30 years ago when its large moon Charon was discovered. The resulting snapshots are expected to bring astronomers closer to estimating the sizes of Pluto’s satellites, Nix, Hydra and Charon.
“Several favorable factors occurred simultaneously to yield these spectacular images of the Pluto system,” said astronomer David Tholen, who performed the observations during an early September evening with one of Mauna Kea’s twin Keck telescopes.
Tholen relied on the adaptive optics system of Keck, which compensates for turbulence from Earth’s atmosphere that typically blurs the light from celestial bodies. In addition, Pluto was at its maximum brightness that night, giving the adaptive optics “stellar” conditions.