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Pluto Fly-By Animation Created From Real Photos and Trajectory Data Credit: Stuart Robbins/NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
Doesn't seem possible when you view it, but it is. All the images are real, and they were all taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during the mid-July flyby of Pluto and its moons. The animation begins with the spacecraft rapidly approaching the planet followed by a swing around the backside, where we see Pluto's atmosphere aglow with sunlight. It ends with New Horizons speeding away, looking back at the two bodies as thin crescents. Beautiful!
Since the flurry of pictures before and during the flyby, very few photos have appeared, but there was one taken on July 16 that I hadn't seen before. It's a post-flyby look at Charon as a crescent taken from 1.2 million miles away (2 million km) and the most recent image in the LORRI (LOng-Range Reconnaissance Imager) archive . Funny though. If you click on it, all you see is black, but if you open it up in an imaging program like Photoshop and lighten the picture, the crescent appears.
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For a nice first person story on how the animation was created, I encourage you to read Stuart Robbins' blog .
