Celestia Forums

There is a recent publication about the night side of Pluto
https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.11976
(thanks pedro_jg for finding this!(seven sent it to my dm)

below is a map of pluto with the night shine



the map for the night side was extracted from Figure 10

This is incorrect (read the paper before posting !) - nearly all of the added portions contain no data, only a small portion of the map you added is real data, as only a small part of the south region was illuminated by Charon.

fyr02 wrote:This is incorrect (read the paper before posting !) - nearly all of the added portions contain no data, only a small portion of the map you added is real data, as only a small part of the south region was illuminated by Charon.

wouldn't pluto's atmosphere still allow that stuff maked "no data" to appear?

Added after 3 hours 4 minutes:
also, i didn't reproject the nightside map myself, the paper already had a map projected, i just chopped it out and combined it with a day lit map

I don't think we can actually see any definitive surface features in the area illuminated by Charon -- and the fact that the distribution of "surface features" in both the illuminated and non-illuminated parts of Pluto's night side seem to have the same characteristic distribution, it would seem to suggest that indeed we aren't actually seeing any surface features here. As low in resolution as it might be, the I think the HST occultation map might be better for most of this area.