And now? Now I'm looking up close and personal at this impossibly distant object and can make out land structures. Just wow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto#/media/File:Pluto_animie...
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/nh-...
The image above is from the same camera as the images released today. Taking great pictures is not about the camera but about getting in the right spot at the right time
Exactly. It's an amusingly low res camera too, just 1 megapixel. But it's a workhorse!
-- Bill Nye
So in that case, a specific (small) region of the Fourier spectrum of that image should correspond to just those lines. So convert your image to Fourier space, locate the region (.. yeah, best to calculate where it should be, cause it won't really stand out enough to spot as the dashing is quite subtle), and then blur, or content-aware heal, or even just blacken the area. Convert back. Dashes gone.
Easy as pi! cough
It's interesting that it is Pluto, but photo of the year? Why?
Because exploration. I really get depressed reading comments like yours, and I don't mean to have a go at you, I understand where you're coming from. It just upsets me that you can look at the product of an over ten year mission and dismiss it with such casual disdain, as if this isn't something that is literally at the limits of what we as a species can do. This is what we were meant to do, what we are programmed to do since birth - explore.
The reason it depresses me is because an overwhelming majority think like you - liek wtf is roks innit who cares. And this is why we spend so much time and effort on inwardly focussed nonsense and no time at all, given what we could do, on exploration and actual achievement.
So yeah. It is just rocks and ice. You are right. By so observing, however, you have missed the point so completely that you have made me sad for the entire human species. Well done.
On top of that, the backlit quality of the photo makes the relief jump at you in a staggering way. It's not like the pictures taken from above, where you can see the same features from very high, in a detached way. Here the landscape just feel real, like if you were there looking at it. Also it gives a sense of the size of the mountains, especially compared to the curvature of the horizon.
Check your local "Pluto time" here: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/plutotime/
Being able to take a photograph of it is a significant achievement. Being able to show features of the landscape? It's amazing.
Here's a nice page that describes a demonstration of the distance to scale.
http://www.noao.edu/education/work/Peppercorn/Peppercorn_Mai...
... Context is everything
In the case of Pluto's high-resolution photos, there are maybe billion dollars behind it and hundreds of people that worked for years before actually the photo has been taken.
I only mention it to underscore that our intuition on the cost of NASA is often wrong. You see a lot of people complaining about the relevance of spending on NASA, when they actually represent a very small part of the overall budget and they spend the money very well.
In contrast, Facebook bought Oculus for $2 billion, tried to buy Snapchat for $3 billion, Microsoft bought Mojang for $2.5 billion. Maybe it's a sign we aren't taxing them enough, if apparently there is enough money to go around for toys but not NASA.
[0] http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/07/14/Here-s-What-It-Cost...
For $720 million, they built a half-ton spacecraft, launched it into space, sent it on a path out of the solar system, tracked and guided it all the way, and had it gather about a million times more data than existed before about a particular small icy body billions of miles away.
To put it into perspective, that's about what it would cost to buy two A380 airliners. Two. You can buy two airliners that are not much different from the ones that existed 40 years ago, but that happen to be somewhat larger and carry some more people, and then have to spend even more money to operate them, or for the same money NASA can do an entire mission to Pluto from start to finish.
Or for a different perspective, for the cost of the B-2 program (an airplane which basically never had a mission, whose key feature probably doesn't work anymore, and which in any case is far too expensive and precious to risk in any environment where there's the slightest chance it could be shot down), assuming costs would be the same as Pluto, NASA could send seven missions each to every planet in the Solar System including Pluto.
For yet another perspective, it's about 1/9th the cost of the Washington Metro's Silver Line product. So, one mission each to every planet in the Solar system including Pluto, or 60 miles of railroad track and 11 light-rail stations.
It's not a sign that people aren't being taxed enough, it's a sign that NASA is a bastion of amazing efficiency and capability in a sea of unbelievable waste.
Oh man, I would love to try VR in zero-G. I wonder if the visual ground reference would take over for the lack of vestibular ground reference? ZOMG! There is science to be done!
They create demand, which means people work to purchase them.
That work brings value to society (person x helped build a bridge, y did a dental implant, z built a yacht (horrors, a toy for a rich person, but recursively read this post)).
This is how economics works. You can't artificially split out some random activity, decide it is 'frivolous', and tax it out of existence. We are creating things, not destroying things. Dollars spent do not disappear, they are leveraged and multiplied via the labor of millions as they pass through our hands in an elaborate dance of IOUs. A dollar bill is a chit - a promise of later labor.
For an extreme example, imagine that every day I hire somebody to move my wood pile to the other side of the house. After two days I'm back where I started, but I've wasted a person's labor for two days. The dollars I paid them didn't disappear, but we've lost whatever useful activity they might have done during that time.
Not all work brings value to society. Just because someone is given money to do something doesn't make that something useful. On the other hand, just because something isn't of value to society doesn't mean it should be prohibited or taxed out of existence. And determining whether something is useful to society is really tough, so we shouldn't assume we can figure it out. But saying they "create thousands of jobs" and "dollars spent do not disappear" isn't a good argument for these things.
Ponzi schemes for example are illegal. Gambling creates no net value so it is tightly regulated. Cigarettes are a net drag on society so they are highly taxed.
(What would be exciting for you, out of interest?)
And sent back images using about the same ambient light as a slightly cloudy evening on Earth.
With no motion blur.
That's not just exciting - it's an amazing feat of engineering.
Pretty neat if you ask me!
Pluto does indeed have an aphelion at some 7,311,000,000km (~48 AU), but its eccentric orbit means that its perihelion is about 20 AU closer to the Sun than its aphelion.
[0]http://spaceprob.es/newhorizons/
[1]http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Mission/Where-is-New-Horizons/index.php