Pluto has some mean mountains. Think low gravity and no erosion.
> With peaks reaching 6.2 km (3.9 mi; 20,000 ft) in height, they are the highest mountain range on Pluto, and also the steepest, with a mean slope of 19.2 degrees.
Just guessing here, but I think the vertical scaling might be for translating some of the top-down images they have. If you take a look at the photo below, Pluto appears to have pretty rough terrain. I didn't find anything about post-processing for this particular image, sorry in advance if I missed it.
I wish the video editing was done at Hollywood because damn it they have great CGI. I want an immersive experience with these space videos, and as soon as I notice low-quality simulated mountains/etc., the whole experience goes away.
My thought process was, this is going to be the actual flyby of new horizons past pluto, no wait it's not, this is just a fake flyby. but look how coarse the heightmap is, they did not just sprinkle high density noise to make a better looking height map, they stuck with actual data, that's nice.
Honestly this is probably too charitable of me, with all the other liberties the author took with the data a high density heightmap was probably just considered not important, rather than some sort of moral highground.
The sun on Pluto is only slightly dimmer than the sun on a very strongly overcast midday on Earth (about half as bright), but still much brighter (almost 200x) than a full moon.
man i could spend hours just watching stuff like this - pluto doesn't even feel real to me half the time. ever catch yourself wondering if we'll ever just get to walk around a world like that for real?
Amazing video. But do note,
> Images from this spectacular passage have been color enhanced, vertically scaled, and digitally combined
I was quite surprised at the height of various features. Turns out yeah Pluto's not actually that wildly mountainous.
Pluto has some mean mountains. Think low gravity and no erosion.
> With peaks reaching 6.2 km (3.9 mi; 20,000 ft) in height, they are the highest mountain range on Pluto, and also the steepest, with a mean slope of 19.2 degrees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenzing_Montes
Just guessing here, but I think the vertical scaling might be for translating some of the top-down images they have. If you take a look at the photo below, Pluto appears to have pretty rough terrain. I didn't find anything about post-processing for this particular image, sorry in advance if I missed it.
https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA19947
Thanks, those very, very big mountains made no sense to me. The radius of Pluto is more than 1000 km
I highly recommend the book Chasing New Horizons to learn more about the New Horizons mission.
I wish the video editing was done at Hollywood because damn it they have great CGI. I want an immersive experience with these space videos, and as soon as I notice low-quality simulated mountains/etc., the whole experience goes away.
I like it, it presents a sort of integrity.
My thought process was, this is going to be the actual flyby of new horizons past pluto, no wait it's not, this is just a fake flyby. but look how coarse the heightmap is, they did not just sprinkle high density noise to make a better looking height map, they stuck with actual data, that's nice.
Honestly this is probably too charitable of me, with all the other liberties the author took with the data a high density heightmap was probably just considered not important, rather than some sort of moral highground.
NASA/JPL can do amazing videos, see Cassini's Grand Finale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrGAQCq9BMU
That was made by Erik Wernquist, he's awesome. https://vimeo.com/erikwernquist
Or at a good game studio. How an immersive NASA 'game' where you walk around (or fly around) Pluto, with or without realistic gravity? In VR?
Pluto is 40x further from the sun than Earth.
That means it gets 1/1600 (0.06%) as much sunlight as us.
I know the eye can adapt a lot to low light, but I doubt Pluto would look anywhere as bright to a human traveller as the video shows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude#List_of_app...
The sun on Pluto is only slightly dimmer than the sun on a very strongly overcast midday on Earth (about half as bright), but still much brighter (almost 200x) than a full moon.
Thanks. That's better than I expected.
I'm now more optimistic for settling Jupiter's moons!
man i could spend hours just watching stuff like this - pluto doesn't even feel real to me half the time. ever catch yourself wondering if we'll ever just get to walk around a world like that for real?
I am getting timeouts for the NASA Site, that never happened to me before. I guess DOGE strikes again :(