Pluto Update!!

Amazing pictures. Just f'n amazing. When I was a young astronomy buff with crudely built telescopes, Saturn was about the limit I could achieve in my back yard. This totally blows my mind.

When I first saw that picture of Pluto, I was struck by how much sense it made. It truly looks like a very, very cold ice ball.

It's interesting the relative size of Pluto and Charon - it's more like a double planet than a planet and a satellite. I'm sure that the center of gravity is well outside Pluto, so what a relative movement they have! The implied tidal forces might explain the younger then expected geological features of Pluto.

I read today that Pluto has blue skies...

"On Pluto, 33 times farther from the sun than Earth is, light from our star is scattered through layers of atmospheric haze in much the same way - except there it's not by molecules of oxygen or nitrogen but by very tiny soot-like particles called tholins."

http://news.discovery.com/space/pluto-a-world-of-blue-skies-and-red-ice-151008.htm