Fun names on Pluto

Informal names for features on Pluto
August 26, 2015

Sorry for the hiatus: I got overtired and had a lurgy. Now that I have a bit of time and energy, I went to see what’s been happening with the New Horizons fly-by of Pluto. The space craft zipped by the dwarf planet over a month ago, but while it was passing, it was too busy taking photos and measurements to send much back to Earth. Then NASA and JPL…

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Pluto and Google Deep Dream

  Deep Dream is all over the internet lately, but for those of you who heaven’t come across it, Google have invented an ‘artificial neural network’ which finds patterns in images, and then matches them with other pictures stored in its memory. The result is seriously weird. I recently learned that some people suffer from a phobia of objects with irregular patterns of holes (Trypophobia) and they find some Deep…

July 19, 2015
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New Horizons flies by Pluto

Enormous heart feature on Pluto. Credits: NASA/APL/SwRI
July 14, 2015

 Oh wow! Today the New Horizons spacecraft zipped past Pluto at 30,800 mph (49,600 km/hr), just 476,000 miles (768,000 kilometers) from the surface. I was expecting something cool, but not a heart 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) across. The heart is quie near Pluto’s equator (the photo mostly shows the northern hemisphere) and it seems remarkably flat. The best guess is that it’s geologically new, because much of the rest of…

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