An exhaustive treatment of the proposed names from io9's Mika McKinnon, complete with biographies and illustrations: http://space.io9.com/were-actively-creatin...iver-1721448557

I've uploaded a version of the Johns Hopkins/SWRI map labeled with feature names at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/135024395@N07...eposted-public/

Edit: Added Charon based on your map, Bjorn: https://www.flickr.com/photos/135024395@N07...eposted-public/

Interesting how they've set up the various schema. Charon's Chasmata are named after fictional vehicles, craters after characters, ect. I can imagine people developing an interest in planetary cartography thanks to what they're doing here.

This is an improved version of a CGI rendering I posted in another thread utilizing the new map and Bjorn's map of Charon with the high resolution frames added. Colorization is false, bump mapping cloned, and global orientations altered to make a prettier picture, but it does give an idea of what's going to be possible as the extant imagery continues to expand and improve.

Pluto and Charon by Orion Moon, on Flickr

Also, a perspective view of the high-resolution images.

Pluto Perspective Rendering by Orion Moon, on Flickr

Cropped and stretched from Herobrine's mosaic:



Dan Delany spoke of perceiving transparency in the ice in post #1027. Looking at this multitude of dark fuzzy dots and smudges, it's very easy to imagine the broken and sunken wreckage of Cthulhu and environs peeking through a frozen sea.

That's magnificent, Herobrine.

There's a lot of subtle fine structure going on in those frigid plains; it's like looking at roads in the Mojave from the air. It seems like the darker materials from the surrounding geography are bleeding into/onto Sputnik Planum around the northern margins. Utterly fascinating.

Here's my take on the seven available frames of the LORRI mosiac of Charon (rimshot):

LORRI Mosaic 0725 7FR by Orion Moon, on Flickr

Contrast enhancement of Sputnik Planum:

Sputnik Planum by Orion Moon, on Flickr

I recall saying to someone earlier that the science teams would have some regrets about not seeing the intriguing Charon-facing hemisphere, but it seems now that they couldn't have planned this better.

Cool piece today in Science by Eric Hand about the processing of the 13 July failsafe image of Pluto:

http://news.sciencemag.org/space/2015/07/h...and-nearly-lost

The nightside in Charonshine is up on the SOC raws page. This appears to be the "polygonal" crater seen on approach:



Edit: Nope, that's Charon. Wow!

My impression is that the pits and craters visible on these mountains are preserved impact structures from when they were still part of Cthulhu, similar to how pressure ridges and bands are retained on the surfaces of the disjointed slabs of Europa's chaos regions...essentially that these mountains are a colossal form of frozen landslide deposit.



Obviously not to scale, and not even the same surface landform, but same general idea.

In my wildly inexpert opinion, the mountains at the margins of Tombaugh Regio are like chunks of dirty slush liberated from their former moorings and refrozen in place, whether by impact or subsurface burp as others here have posited.

I've been misspelling it all week. It certainly is strange...I think they got it backwards with the naming scheme. The tentacles are on the plains.

Beautiful work, scalbers, neo56, and ZLD!

Something jumped out at me today while looking at the blocky mountains just east of Cthulhu (no, it wasn't a shoggoth). The 1980 landslide (with subsequent catastrophic eruption) at Mt. St. Helens filled the Toutle River valley to a depth of up to 180 meters, and in several broad areas left spectacular hummocky deposits comprised of rubble from the collapsed cone. The scales are vastly different, but the superficial appearances of these features are strikingly similar to my eyes.

A lengthy piece by Mika McKinnon was published today on io9 regarding the collision origin theory for Charon and the possibility of a related subsurface ocean on Pluto.

http://space.io9.com/could-a-massive-colli...n-on-1719439790

Most welcome! Adjusted for content.

Gladstoner, that comparison is pure genius.

This thread seems like the right place for something like this. Rendering of Pluto and Charon using the maps created by Bjorn Jonsson, with their relative positions and orientations tweaked for aesthetics:

An attempt to summarize what we've seen of this southern portion of the Tombaugh-Cthulhu boundary as of today's release, rendered in spectacular fudge-o-vision. Riddled with position errors, but a passable "artistic" overview for the moment.



Wouldn't have imagined in a million years that I'd type the phrase "Tombaugh-Cthulhu boundary".

The dark equatorial band just looks awesomely disrupted in this area. I like MarsInMyLifetime's take. The mountains have the appearance of shattered, tilted blocks of icy crust, and the aprons at their margins a bit like the chaotic matrix rubble on Europa. The dark material collecting in the troughs of the icy plains in Tombaugh could be remnants of the old surface, and the whole mess to the south has the appearance of having poured out in lobes, pushing blocks ahead of it.

Still shaking off five years of rust here. Playing around with the screencapped mosaic shown at the last press conference, overlay with May's 2x2. Looking forward to seeing more raws.



Edit: Scalloped margins in the southeast portion of Tombaugh remind me of plateau features on Io, like Tvashtar Mensae.

Contrast-adjusted greyscale and high pass filter variants of the new mosiac:

My overall impression is that it really looks an awful lot like Mars on this hemisphere, with the western lobe of the "heart" standing in for Hellas. Plenty of muted craters...it's easy to imagine everything filled in with pulverized fluffy drifts of what would be atmosphere sunward. Spectacular image, and it's magnificently detailed in comparison to the sibling VT OOPS photo of Triton from a quarter-century before. It's difficult to wait for the steady trickle of high-resolution data ahead. May every future mission pack a scan platform, a fusion reactor, and a high-gain antenna the size of a football field.

Strong emotions watching the signal confirmation come in, and actual tears of joy and relief with the report that the data was secure, especially after the scare last week. I can't begin to express how happy I am for everyone involved. What a tremendous thrill. Also a real pleasure to follow along here.

Can't get over how much the complex regions rotating out of view superficially resemble aspects of the pull-apart wedge terrains of Europa and Ganymede at these long ranges. Perhaps a bit of Triton, a bit of Iapetus, a bit of the Galileans, and a whole lot of things we've never seen before...it's easy to imagine this system making geology across the rest of the outer solar system much easier to understand. Utterly fantastic images, and such an incredible privilege to witness this.

Fascinating. The jump and stutter gives it a spooky sort of silent film quality.

Facepalm.

I wouldn't normally pick on something like this, but the realization that this person has a job reporting on such things nearly caused a stroke.

Wild speculation,...I'm convinced that the area surrounding Amata is a large, badly degraded palimpsest. The name Amata was of course reassigned to a crater because the feature that had that name pre-Cassini proved to be imaginary due to low resolution. There does seem to be a big, obvious circular feature there in low sun, but since I have a habit of imagining circular features, I will just leave this vaguely misleading, conspiracy-theorist-looking graphic and shuffle away whistling....

That's Neith in the middle of the bottom row: