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Pluto Clears Up

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Clear picture of Pluto and it's moons
Pluto, with a smaller dot representing its largest moon, Charon.
The two specks in the upper right are Nix and Hydra,
Pluto's recently discovered mini-moons.
The white streaks are background star tracks.


University of Hawaii astronomer Dr. David Tholen has used a ground-based telescope to take an image of the Pluto system that exceeds the sharpness possible with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Tholen took the pictures with the uber-cool Mauna Kea's twin Keck telescopes, which use an adaptive optics system. He took 16 images of the Pluto system during one hour on the Keck telescope. When he combined all 16 images to form a single image, Nix and Hydra, Pluto's small satellites discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2005, became clearly visible. As far as I know, this is the first picture that has Pluto and its three satellites.

I don't know about you, but I don't see no stinking pictures of the other "dwarf" planets, Eris or Ceres, with 3 moons. (Yes, I know. Erishas one moon, Dysnomia.) It's time those astronomers at the IAU gave Pluto back it's planet rating. Repeat after me: Pluto's a planet! Pluto's a planet!

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This page contains a single entry by DanielBMarkham published on October 14, 2007 5:29 PM.

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