> Images from this spectacular passage have been color enhanced, vertically scaled, and digitally combined
I was quite surprised at the height of various features. Turns out yeah Pluto's not actually that wildly mountainous.
> With peaks reaching 6.2 km (3.9 mi; 20,000 ft) in height, they are the highest mountain range on Pluto, and also the steepest, with a mean slope of 19.2 degrees.
My thought process was, this is going to be the actual flyby of new horizons past pluto, no wait it's not, this is just a fake flyby. but look how coarse the heightmap is, they did not just sprinkle high density noise to make a better looking height map, they stuck with actual data, that's nice.
Honestly this is probably too charitable of me, with all the other liberties the author took with the data a high density heightmap was probably just considered not important, rather than some sort of moral highground.
That means it gets 1/1600 (0.06%) as much sunlight as us.
I know the eye can adapt a lot to low light, but I doubt Pluto would look anywhere as bright to a human traveller as the video shows.
The sun on Pluto is only slightly dimmer than the sun on a very strongly overcast midday on Earth (about half as bright), but still much brighter (almost 200x) than a full moon.
I'm now more optimistic for settling Jupiter's moons!
jmclnx•8mo ago