> 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.
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•6h ago