Pluto’s northern hemisphere in colour – ‘reddish brown’ dwarf planet
Pluto’s northern hemisphere in colour – ‘reddish brown’ dwarf planet
Astronomers have only been able to get a very vague idea of the surface of Pluto using ground-based observatories and images acquired by the Hubble Space Telescope. This first map of the northern hemisphere of Pluto is derived from data acquired by New Horizons during the approach phase, from a distance of more than 10 million kilometres; they show the dwarf planet in near true colour. High-resolution monochrome images from the LORRI instrument were used to produce the animation on the left. The map projection on the right includes colour information from the camera system Ralph. For the centre animation, both data sets were combined.
