Pluto Surface Observations 3: NH Post-Encounter Phase, 1 Feb 2016- TBD Options

[nprev]

This topic is for all New Horizons Pluto surface observations received after 1 Feb 2016.

[Herobrine]

Here's an animation of the Pluto system approach, starting 2015-01-25 and ending 2015-07-13, played at a constant rate of 391,520 times actual speed (with the exception of a jump forward 1 1/2 seconds in, where 67 days pass in 1 second).
It includes LORRI observations from 139 different points in time, all aligned to the background star field. The JPEGs from the SOC site were used.
This shows the view from New Horizons looking in a fixed direction during the approach. The field of view in the animation is about 1.1 x 0.9 degrees.

(Click above for giant GIF)
It starts as a pair of dots in the top-right corner. The animation appears choppy at times (it even freezes for 3 seconds at one point), due to differences in the amount of time between observations.
The version above draws each frame over the previous ones, attempting to preserve stars and the disks of Pluto and Charon from previous frames (using a terrible algorithm I wrote), to leave trails of the binary planet.
It's at the native resolution of the LORRI frames, so the animation is very large, dimension-wise. It clocks in at under a megabyte, though, due to the fact that only a small part of the image changes in each frame.
The alignment to the background star field was done visually, by a combination of a program I wrote (which got over half of the frames rotated to the same orientation for me) and manual measuring, rotating, and aligning of each frame. For some frames, I could only detect one background star, and had to estimate the Pluto-Charon barycenter and use that as a second point so I could find the orientation of the frame. I stopped at the frame I stopped at because I couldn't detect any stars in any of the frames from next two observation times. A smart person probably would have used available SPICE kernels to figure out the orientations and do the alignment for everything, saving weeks of effort. Maybe I'll be a smart person some day.

Here are all of the frames drawn together.

(Click for full size, 3974x3197)

There's also a version that draws each entire frame over the previous one, replacing whatever was there before, so it doesn't leave trails. In a few frames where parts of Pluto and Charon from the previous frame weren't covered by the new frame, I manually erased them.
That version is available here, but be advised that this version is 14 MiB. The other version was much smaller because it didn't preserve all of the small changes to the background with each frame.

Edit: Added more information and a link to a second version