New Horizons: Approach Phase, OpsNav - 25 January 15 to 28 June 15 Options

[Bjorn Jonsson]

This reveals a relatively dark, narrow feature oriented roughly between the 4 o'clock and 10 o'clock positions - it may have been visible in the earlier set of images as well (I haven't checked the subspacecraft longitude).

What I think is really interesting now is whether deconvolution would start revealing details on Charon. It's going to be very interesting to see what the next set of deconvolved images released by the NH team look like.

[0101Morpheus]

Trying to understand Pluto without Charon is like trying to put a puzzle together with only half the pieces. Or with a quarter of the pieces, in accordance with the square-cube law.

[Gerald]

That's my cleaned and stacked, cropped, 4x-magnified versions of the 2015-05-28, 2015-05-29, and 2015-05-30 full-frame 1x1-binned quadruples:

I didn't apply any enhancement or rotational adjustment, just cleaning and stacking by averaging the three most similar pixel values of each of the four registered images within each set.

[ZLD]

Some detail is visible on Pluto even without deconvolution,

Probably over did it but I think Pluto is still a bit too far away to make deconvolution all that useful.

[Phil Stooke]

I always thought Pluto was some sort of weird hound, but it looks more like a Pug in that view!

Phil

[Gerald]

This image is obtained by averaging 4-fold magnified and registered versions, both together in a one-step transformation (by bilinear interpolation), of the four 2015-05-30 full-frame 1x1 binned LORRI images. After linear reduction of brightness, excessive sharpening, followed by another 4-fold magnification for better visibility:


This is a look at the radius-2 hipass portion of the (4x4-fold supersampled) average image, again another 4-fold magnification for better visibility, and a 16-fold brightness-stretch:

From the latter image I'd say, the dark region at the right is well above jpg artifact level, same for the more or less diagonal central darkish area. There may be some additional structuring, but it competes with artifacts.
For Charon I don't see much more than the PSF and artifacts.

For completeness, here a 4-frame animated gif, made of the registered 4-fold magnified (bilinear) and cropped images, before averaging and sharpening:

[Gerald]

The new LORRI 4x4-binned images seem to consist of at least two series, one with exposure time a little below 3s, summarized as OpNav Campaign 4,
and "footprint" images with exposure a little below 10s, like previous 4x4-binned images.

Starting with OpNav Campaign 4:
The images are now taken in sets of 6, in contrast to sets of 5 as in OpNav Campaign 3.
I've still to adjust to the additional 6th image, so here a preliminary overview with only 5 of each image series, plus the stacked image:

Thus far there are 4 such sets available.
Here an album of the stacked and 4x-magnified images, registered relative to the first.

Two moons (Nix/Hydra) are well-perceivable, Styx and Kerberos not (yet) obvious.

[Paolo]

meanwhile, Hubble Finds Two Chaotically Tumbling Pluto Moons
there should be a Nature paper out soon, but I can't find it yet

[Explorer1]

June 4th issue according to this article: http://www.nature.com/news/pluto-s-moons-m...rony-1.17681#b1

Resonances too.

[Paolo]

paper is here: Resonant interactions and chaotic rotation of Pluto’s small moons

[SFJCody]

Press release renderings of the moons are lovely, but they must surely have some of the shortest usable lifespans of any such images ever made. Reality is fast approaching...

[ChrisC]

NASA to Hold Media Call to Discuss Surprising Observations of Pluto’s Moons
http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-to-...-pluto-s-moons/
NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, June 3, to discuss the Hubble Space Telescope's surprising observations of how Pluto's moons behave, and how these new discoveries are being used in the planning for the New Horizons Pluto flyby in July.
Audio of the teleconference will be streamed live at: http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio

Was anybody able to gets the NASA newsaudio stream to work? All I ever got was the page with a blank/black embedded window, no playback.

Now I have to hope that someone captured it ...

[Gerald]

Yeah, time is running short with publishing discoveries near Pluto, before New Horizons will overtake in the next weeks.
Besides this, any a-priori knowledge would be useful for hazard assessment.

...Here an overview of eight series of "footprint" images, all taken on 2015-05-30 within less than an hour:

(using 5 of 6 images of each series due to restrictions of my software, but this should yield useful results already)

All these images should be "stackable" to one image with reasonable "motion blur".
I'll see, whether I can convince my computer to do so.

[Gladstoner]

Was this the subject of today's press release?

http://www.wired.com/2015/06/odd-orbits-de...plutos-mystery/

[Gerald]

My computer has been more successful with registering and stacking the images than me with finding a recorded version of the audionews in the same time.

So here an album of registered and stacked "footprint" images.

And the median and mean: