Parallax on 2014 MU69

NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI

Parallax on 2014 MU69

Between August and December 2018, New Horizons took optical navigation photos of the tiny Kuiper belt object 2014 MU69 to improve navigators' predictions of its future path. At first, the world didn't move much against the background of stars, but as New Horizons got within tens of millions of kilometers in December, the position appeared to shift more and more rapidly. These images are very long exposures in order to make faint stars visible. MU69 is not yet resolved in any of them; its light spreads over many pixels but the object itself is smaller than a pixel, so it's not possible to discern its shape yet.

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Original image data dated on or about December 24, 2018

Explore related images: New Horizons, trans-neptunian objects, BMSIL, pretty pictures, 486958 Arrokoth (2014 MU69), animation Pluto's Neighborhood December 27, 2018 first-parallax-on-MU69.html

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