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Related: About this forumAn enigmatic line across Pluto: Plutonian canali!?
If you're an image processing magician like Björn Jónsson, you can take several images like these and stack and sharpen them to reveal more detail than can be perceived in any single photo. Björn took four images from June 6 and produced this.
New Horizons captured the four images used to make this view on June 6, 2015 from a distance of 46 million kilometers. Four images have been stacked and sharpened. The dark line running across Pluto is likely a real feature, not a processing artifact. Charon is still too small for any apparent features to be definitively discerned.
See that diagonal line running across it? Björn is certain that it's an actual feature. Yay! Dark lines criscrossing a disk! It's the discovery of canali on Pluto! We have reached Schiaparelli-quality mapping of Pluto's surface!
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/06091643-an-enigmatic-line-across-pluto.html
Only time will tell
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An enigmatic line across Pluto: Plutonian canali!? (Original Post)
jakeXT
Jun 2015
OP
The bands on Jupiter and Saturan have regular lines. So unless Youggoth or the Mi-go are real,
Agnosticsherbet
Jun 2015
#1
Agnosticsherbet
(11,619 posts)1. The bands on Jupiter and Saturan have regular lines. So unless Youggoth or the Mi-go are real,
I suspect that we will find a natural explanation.
At a distance of 46 million miles, it would need to be very large.
eppur_se_muova
(36,290 posts)2. "Schiaparelli-quality" ... i.e., good enough to mislead.
Let's be patient and wait for higher resolution before interpreting.
I notice you said "canali", the Italian word Schiaparelli used. For those who aren't familiar with the story, this was widely misinterpreted as "canals" (i.e. artificial waterways) when "channels" (natural waterways) was closer to his intention. Many English speakers, and Percival Lowell in particular, built up quite a fantastic picture of a civilization on Mars based on little more than this misreading and the (at times, seemingly willful) misinterpretation of telescopic images of Mars by visual observers (the "canals" didn't seem to show in photographs).
jakeXT
(10,575 posts)3. Yep .. be patient, but we are already better than Hubble
Although probably not quite as good as that computer generated image
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"This has taken four years and 20 computers operating continuously and simultaneously to accomplish," says Buie, who developed a special computer program to sharpen the Hubble data.
http://www.space.com/7869-views-pluto-reveal-weird-bright-spot.html