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Departing Pluto

Departing Pluto

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NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI / Allen Perkins

Departing Pluto
New Horizons captured this sequence of images with its LORRI camera during the first week after its flyby of the Pluto system. This animation has been aligned on stars faintly visible in the background. Pluto's path appears to curve against the background stars because of the gravitational influence of Charon; the two similar-sized worlds mutually orbit a point well outside of Pluto, rotating around the system barycenter once in seven days. Charon is not visible in the animation initially because it is out of frame, and later because its thin crescent is too faint.

Here, the animation frames have been stacked, to highlight Pluto's curving path against the background stars.

Departing Pluto (stacked frames)

NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI / Allen Perkins / "fredk"

Departing Pluto (stacked frames)

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For uses not allowed by that license, contact us to request publication permission from the copyright holder: Allen Perkins

Original image data dated on or about July 21, 2015

Explore related images: trans-neptunian objects, New Horizons, pretty pictures, Pluto, amateur image processing, dwarf planets beyond Neptune, animation

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