I seriously doubt that.

Indeed.

Stunning and awesome.... both the sublime images of Pluto and the technological achievement.

Exactly 50 years ago on 14 July 1965 US time (15 July UTC) Mariner 4 made its own fly-by of Mars, providing our first close-up views of another planet.
Now New Horizons has completed the survey of all the planets we learned as children. What a project to witness in one lifetime!

Many congratulations to all involved.

I'm seriously joking Dan

Yeah, image processing artifact. Didn't they say this morning that the thin atmosphere is basically transparent?

Yes, doubtful.

Highpass will bring out ring artifacts, and create the illusion of a brightness along the limb.

On the other hand, the released image is not raw.
Certainly there was a circular selection made around the planet, to bring the lightness of the disk up, while keeping the background of the frame black.
Makes perfect sense for them to do that on an image that most people will see on TV, cellphone, etc, in well lit places.
So it's that selection that you are seeing, not the atmosphere. At least that's my interpretation.

I noticed that too.

But I haven't seen the bright spot in any other image, yet. It could be a hot pixel in LORRI.

You can see this in another LORRI image, right side, middle:

LORRI image

Sorry guys, had to deal with the police coming to my house because my SWEAR JAR EXPLODED!

Congrats New Horizons team, every day of those ten years was totally worth it!

I couldn't resist working on the latest pics just out of interest to see how much I could enhance the surface features to make them a bit clearer.... no pretence at scientific accuracy although the result doesn't look too bad...
Brilliant work by Alan Stern and the team. The realization of such a huge life goal after so many years hard unrelenting effort. What will power!!! Great to see 25% are women. The sooner it is about 50/50 the better.……Hᴜɢʜ….ツ

I think I'm seeing many small diameter craters, as predicted by some impact models.

I hope I'm wrong, because a lack of craters would mean an active, dynamic surface.

I'm sure the planetary scientists will be analyzing the data for years. Stay tuned.

Wow!

It almost has a sense of depth.

Thanks Marvin. This wasn't from a raw image so it was basically working on the photo more for my own enjoyment than posting! There are some really talented people on this forum
who do great work - I've learned heaps from them!! It's late in Central Australia and I have to get up early tomorrow!! ……Hᴜɢʜ….ツ

wow..you can in black background?

This is a new version of my map incorporating the image obtained at a range of 738,000 km. It's not in color since (as fredk has shown in this post) the image was colorized with a single hue (i.e. clearly not with new MVIC data). Longitude 0 is at the left edge of the map.

EDIT: The color in the image is in fact from a recent MVIC image, it's just very uniform. So the image was not colorized with a single hue.



There are some minor feature position discrepancies along the boundary between the new image and the older data. Once I have more hi-res data I'll reproject the older images again, using the higher-res global images (or images where Pluto's limb is visible) as reference.

And here is a rotation movie rendered using this map:

 pluto_rot_20150714_c.mp4 ( 1.93MB ) Number of downloads: 1348

You're lucky! My swear jar got so overfilled it imploded and created a miniature black hole. The only positive part of the mess it created is that I will not have to vacuum clean this week.

Serious, congratulation to the NH team and thank you 4throck for that image. I take that one as the final impression for this evening and now we can start looking forward to the images and information that will trickle down in days and weeks to come.

And far fewer craters than I expected, you guys were right on that part!