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I was looking at a picture of the dwarf planet Pluto, and suddenly remembered a dream I had long ago. I went to Pluto, and it had a giant gash very visible from space.

Looking at the fuzzy images we do have of Pluto, as well as in Celestia (sample screenshot here), if I look at them from a distance (or simply resize them to 150 or so pixels), it looks like Pluto does indeed have a giant gash on the surface.

If so, what could have caused it?

Assuming Charon was formed in a similar way as our moon, it could have been the impact of a "dwarf planetesimal" or large asteroid. The impact debris could have formed Charon. It also *might* (although unlikely) explain the drastic color (and thus probably material) differences on Pluto's surface.

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Hmmm, this sounds a little farfetched but if an asteriod hit it at such a shallow angle, it could have glanced off the surface. Thus taking a huge chunck with it.

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Now that you mention it, thoes maps do resemble Pluto.

I once had a fictional planet named Dalargrios which had a huge gash all around the equator. Of course the gash wasn't natural, it was caused by bombing during millions of battles. Empires put their military bases there not knowing that everyone else who went there got pwned by their enemies because of the environment. As usual, this empire had placed a base there and it got bombed. Eventually, since bases were often placed in trenches around the equator to provide cover from drones, the equator got dug out until the only thing keeping the planet's hemispheres from colliding was the solid (now cooled) core. Now that I think about it, that may have not been so plausible.

Hello

Not a giant gash.A giant mountain.
Let me explain:

For the last 2 years we've been imaging Pluto ,and the rest of the Solar System,with a groundbreaking image processing technique.
We've already covered about 2/3 of Pluto's rotation and it's all documented on our website: http://www.spacenow.com.br/index.html
It's a discovery that's already been reported to the IAU last year.
We know that a lot of people will resist this fact, but it's true.The Photos speak for themselves and the surface features repeat themselves in the photos.
We think that everyone should know about it,specially the Pluto buffs.

A 14" Meade telescope is revealing all this detail that the other large telescopes have missed with much longer exposures?

You can't expect us to believe this.

And based on your results for other solar system bodies, I think it's clear your technique is flawed. If anything, the images on your site are artistic representations, or extremely poorly processed imagery. They reveal nothing new about any of the solar system bodies you show on this page.

Sorry, your 14" Meade isn't as far ahead of HST, Keck, Gemini et al as you have been lead to believe.

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Whoever said that SPACENOW didn't bring anything new to our SOLAR SYSTEM knowledege doesn't know much about astronomy.
With just a brief research he/she would find out that neither Pluto nor Charon or Puck or Kleopatra or even Ceres have never been successfully imaged.
SPACENOW with the HMIR technique pushed the envelope as far direct as observations from Earth, in a manner that the catching up with us will take some time.
As to the resolution,focal distance and other imaging constraints ,HMIR (short for Hidden Micro Image Retrieval) steers clear off these issues.
It begins AFTER the images are captured (the HMIR way, off course) and regardless if it is an 8",12" 40" ,2 meters or 8,4 meters telescope,any image,provided that it's taken with a color CCD camera hooked on any tescope,will be HMIR processable and produce the incredible results seen on SPACENOW.
For a better understanding of how it works,we exhibited 2 videos documenting the whole procedure under ,HMIR technique, on the SPACENOW website.

ageyer wrote:Hello

Not a giant gash.A giant mountain.
Let me explain:

For the last 2 years we've been imaging Pluto ,and the rest of the Solar System,with a groundbreaking image processing technique.
We've already covered about 2/3 of Pluto's rotation and it's all documented on our website: http://www.spacenow.com.br/index.html
It's a discovery that's already been reported to the IAU last year.
We know that a lot of people will resist this fact, but it's true.The Photos speak for themselves and the surface features repeat themselves in the photos.
We think that everyone should know about it,specially the Pluto buffs.

ageyer,

OK here you talk to an experienced theoretical physicist with research emphasis on astroparticle physics and cosmology. Just explain to me in plain physics terms how you can claim to bridge the huge mismatch with what we know:

1) Today's angular diameter of Pluto as seen from Earth is about 0.05 arcsecs, while the theoretical resolution of a 14" Meade catadioptric telescope is almost a factor of 5-10 worse!
This does not even account for the usually much worse effective resolution due to atmospheric disturbances.

2) Over years, a professional observation of the Pluto-Charon system with the Hubble telescope has been performed under the lead of Prof. Marc Buie with very encouraging results published recently in the renowned Astronomical Journal

The published scientific papers from 2009 are here:

http://hubblesite.org/pubinfo/pdf/2010/06/pdf1.pdf
http://hubblesite.org/pubinfo/pdf/2010/06/pdf2.pdf

On our CelesltialMatters site you also find a brief discussion in form of images etc:
http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewtopic.php?t=362

With Hubble there is no atmospheric deterioration unlike your earthbound observations! Also, the optical power of Hubble certainly exceeds a Meade 14" by a large margin...

I have been in contact with Marc B. and know their approach very well.

Despite their hi-tech professional observation method a claim of e.g. resolving a big mountain on Pluto is totally out of the question...

Well, we do know a few proven tricks to improve earthbound resolution by some amount:
We can use video techniques, select the sharpest images among many and stack them on top of each other. This technique, however, is known to work only in case of bright objects like the moon, for example.

We can use interferometry but this also doesn't work for Pluto.

We could also use a clever apodization mask, but the gain in resolution would be by far insufficient.

So you got the word. Tell us!

Fridger

I have watched ageyer's demonstration videos of his (her?) HMIR technique. This is a crop of a frame from the Enceladus video, supposedly produging the image seen here. The overexposed part is Saturn. One can see, despite the blurriness of the exposition, that the rings are almost horizontal, so that the poles point up and down. Now, the axis of Enceladus is almost parallel to Saturn's (check with Celestia!), so Enceladus' Southern Pole must also be up or down. Yet the supposed "jets" are seen pointing sideways. Ergo, those are not Enceladus' jets. Not to mention that the true jets (actually, plumes) are only located near the South Pole. No jets have been observed in the northern region, not even from the vantage observing point of the Cassini probe. For me this is enough evidence against ageyer's techinque: the supposed features are, at best, artifacts arising from over-processing.

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Guillermo,

before writing my post above, I also had a quick look at his/her Enceladus "results" and my gut feeling told me right away that this (the overexposed object) was actually Saturn.
I was finally convinced that this was all fake because one could even make out droplets in Enceladus' sideways eruptions along with little details on the moon's surface. Absolutely impossible.

Fridger

Hello Fridger

I'm just back from a quick trip and that's why this post is a little belated.

The optical constraints that you mentioned have all been respected.
What HMIR does is hidden data extraction.
There's a breakthrough in it.At the moment ,with the help of a mathematician,we're working on the pragmatic explanation to later publish a paper.
In a nutshell though,let me address the points you raised.
All these objects appear bigger that they really are.It's the "point of light source" principle.
If you take Pluto for instance,the real Pluto,not the one broadened by the atmosphere,is smaller and usualy encompasses only one or two pixels.There's no challenging this fact.
This is what we came up with 2 years ago:
Since the atmosphere is air and the bottom 160km of it is responsible for the famous "atmospheric seeing" that has been hindering our clear vision of the firmament,what if ,instead of only a few pictures of the same object(pluto in this case)we took dozens,hundreds of consecutive exposures?
Assuming that at a certain moment the atmosphere is bound to stabilize,when it does, it could be used as a magnifying glass for these small diametered objects and the "point of light source"could be spread evenly outward in a way that the true face of the object will come across clearcut and pristine.
Of course this was theory,but when put to practice it worked and the HMIR formula was starting to unravel.
There were still challenges ahead,like extracting the hidden data.
This was done with the programs chosen to perform what we expected.They are great with colors and the new single shot color CCD cameras that were being introduced to the market 2 yeras ago when we started out had three new wavelengths of information in the RGB coated pixels inside it.
After a few try-outs, our theory proved right.
Certain shots are so perfect that they only need the curves and levels tools available on ADOBE PHOTOSHOP to bring out the info.
If you take the trouble to watch the Io processing video on SPACENOW you'll see what I'm saying

ageyer,

unfortunately, most of what you argued does NOT contain any hard physical facts.

Hence I suggest to Selden to move this stuff elsewhere, since your claims have little to do with "Physics and Astronomy" as far as I can tell.

ageyer wrote:Hello Fridger

I'm just back from a quick trip and that's why this post is a little belated.

The optical constraints that you mentioned have all been respected.
What HMIR does is hidden data extraction.
There's a breakthrough in it.At the moment ,with the help of a mathematician,we're working on the pragmatic explanation to later publish a paper.

I hope you don't want to tell me here that you managed to circumvent basic laws of physics by using clever mathematics . This can never work...

In a nutshell though,let me address the points you raised.
All these objects appear bigger that they really are.It's the "point of light source" principle.

Sorry the "point of light source" principle does not tell me anything. Never heard about it as a physicist. Are you trying to claim that thanks to a magnifying effect of Earth's atmosphere you were able to resolve surface details of Pluto!? My God...

If you take Pluto for instance,the real Pluto,not the one broadened by the atmosphere,is smaller and usualy encompasses only one or two pixels.There's no challenging this fact.
This is what we came up with 2 years ago:
Since the atmosphere is air and the bottom 160km of it is responsible for the famous "atmospheric seeing" that has been hindering our clear vision of the firmament,what if ,instead of only a few pictures of the same object(pluto in this case)we took dozens,hundreds of consecutive exposures?

Stacking images is of course not new, as I emphasized above. Such techniques are always used in professional astronomical work. For bright objects like the Moon, people even took thousands of images within a short time by means of video recording. But then for each individual image, the exposure time is so short that the method can only apply for a very bright object. Certainly NOT for 14 mag Pluto!

Assuming that at a certain moment the atmosphere is bound to stabilize,when it does, it could be used as a magnifying glass for these small diametered objects and the "point of light source"could be spread evenly outward in a way that the true face of the object will come across clearcut and pristine.

This must be a JOKE!

Fridger

Hello Fridger

First of all,I didn't open this thread.Whoever did, was talking about a giant gash on Pluto.If it belonged here or not should have been decided then,not now.
Second,We don't stack up images.We use just one chosen among hundreds(apparently you didn't pay much attention to what I said, let alone watch the Io video).

Third,the point of light source is a known concept in astro-imaging.I can direct you to a few of these explanations if you're interested in learning. about it.

Fourth,just because you are a physicist,doesn't qualify you to question the merit of a grounbreaking technique such as HMIR.

Fifth,not only Pluto but the whole Solar System has been imaged with HMIR,including objects never visualized before such as Kleopatra or Puck.

It seems that you should brush up with your narrow view of new methods for astro-imaging.

ageyer wrote:Fourth,just because you are a physicist,doesn't qualify you to question the merit of a grounbreaking technique such as HMIR.

I'm not a physicist and even I can tell it's nonsense.

All it takes is some basic understanding of current technological progress, and what the bodies actually look like (so as to tell your images are not real). Your image of the asteroid belt especially gives it away. Asteroids are quite simply not packed that tightly together in the Main Belt. Your images resemble a cartoon more than reality.

You may sincerely believe in the technique there, but you have been duped.

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