r/interestingasfuck • u/Puzzleheaded_Web5245 • 17h ago
Views of pluto through the years r/all
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u/anttilles 16h ago
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u/OkHarrisonBidet 16h ago
His new cosmos was boring af
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u/AgentWowza 9h ago
Really? I thought it was pretty cool. It's how I learned about tardigrades.
The opening sequence is super pretty too.
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u/eat-pussy69 16h ago
Cosmos Possible Worlds?
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u/OkHarrisonBidet 15h ago
2014 one. I was so excited for it and told my family it’s a must-watch and to watch it together with me. The scene a boy touching a girl’s face was cringe and awkward af. The animation of a guy fearing lead pollution was childish and boring and too long af. I can’t forget my family’s eyes questioning me “is this that good?”
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u/GeneReddit123 11h ago
While personally I agree with you, I wouldn't put the blame for that on NDT himself, but rather on the modern media expectations in the age of TikTok and YT shorts. You're expected to draw attention with quick snippets and hyperbole. It's Carl Sagan which the new generation would say is "boring af", because they can't focus on his thought process long enough to make sense.
The OG Gilded Age came with yellow journalism, which, in its heyday, grabbed all the attention away from more "reputable" and thoughtful publications. The current Gilded Age 2.0 is no different. We're in a digital yellow journalism age, a time in which Carl Sagan has no place. We can only hope that one day we will be past it, just like we passed the original one.
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u/CardOfTheRings 10h ago
Tik toc and YouTube shorts didn’t exist when the show was made. What are you even on about
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u/Stopikingonme 10h ago
Nah, he’s right, it was boring as fuck.
(I rewatch the original on DVD every once in a while and still find little snippets that draw me in. NDT’s was paint by numbers tv with his monotone “I’m soo much smarter than everyone” voice.)
His hard on against religions turned me off as well. The OG with Sagan’s kind voice was a big part of what allowed me to question my anti-science upbringing and make the change. Sagan addressed the same things but with tact, and gentle understanding.
I’m sure you’re right about the tik tok gen finding it boring for their own reasons as well but his version was a huge bummer for a lot of us Saganites.
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u/Spank_Engine 15h ago
That's too bad! I'm reading Cosmos right now and wanted to watch that one after thinking that it will be an updated version of Carl Sagan's documentary.
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u/Gumbercules81 15h ago
Photo #4 is not accurate. It's quite as drab as you'd imagine something at the edge of our solar system
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u/KnotiaPickle 13h ago
Why did they add those wild colors?
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u/Wide_Combination_773 13h ago
It's a representation of the spectroscopic readings representing concentrations of different elements in the soil/ice.
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u/owa00 13h ago
It's probably various chemical spectroscopic measurements overlaid on a topographic map.
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u/randylush 10h ago
“Overlaid on a topographical map” implies this is color on top of a rendering of the planet based on some 3d data of the planet’s topography. Which sounds insanely complicated and speculation that’s just unlikely to be true. It’s much more likely that this is simply a set of photographs.
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u/Maxx2245 5h ago
Not at all. When New Horizons was taking pictures, it was taking images within and outside of the visible spectrum. "2018" is a false-colour image that superimposes IR/UV onto the visible spectrum and that is the resultant image
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u/randylush 5m ago
Exactly. It’s a set of photographs. It’s a photograph on the IR, UV and visible spectrums. None of those are topographical maps.
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u/Gumbercules81 13h ago
Generate more buzz/views
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u/anti_pope 13h ago
That is the reason these things are posted as if they're real. It is not however the reason it was done. Each color is a different material.
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u/Booty_Bumping 12h ago edited 11h ago
False color images are not just to make it look cool. It has a research purpose — it's easier to identify chemical compounds when certain wavelengths are highlighted. In fact, most space cameras can't produce anything but false color images, because they are not photographing in RGB (although a few spacecraft do have an RGB camera, such as Perseverance, but it's not the most useful camera it has). The ones that have wild looking colors are actually less processed than the ones that are intended to look accurate to the human eye, because they are just assigning existing sensor channels to colors and not doing any color inference based on incomplete data. In a sense it's actually the true color images that are made for hype, because they only rarely show up in research papers. When they do show up, the purpose is usually to vaguely refer to a specific dataset / previous research papers rather than a specific image.
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u/timberwolf0122 13h ago
It’s a false color applied, probably because they imaged using frequencies we can’t see like uv/ir or radar
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u/Browndog888 17h ago
2025 - houses & aliens playing at the park.
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u/Wonderful_Ninja 17h ago
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u/garrafadeacido 16h ago
I have questions for 1996 lol
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u/Fantastic-Wallaby267 12h ago
I'm 95% sure it's a golf ball spray painted silver and taken with a slightly blurred camera.
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u/Infinite-Condition41 16h ago edited 12h ago
And yet, it wasn't discovered with telescopes, it was discovered with math.
Take that flat earthers.
Edit: Upon further research, this isn't strictly true. Mathematics suggested locations for the possible location of a ninth planet but it was telescopes and photography and comparing pictures looking for moving objects which eventually nailed down it's existence. Unlike Uranus, Pluto doesn't have the mass to noticeably affect the orbits of the other, much larger, planets.
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u/KnightOfWords 15h ago
You're probably thinking of Neptune, which was discovered due to discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus, suggesting another unseen planet was affecting it.
The search for Planet X was inspired by the same technique, due to supposed deviations in Neptune's orbit. Pluto was discovered but it isn't nearly massive enough to significantly affect Neptune's orbit. When Voyager 2 visited Uranus and Neptune estimates of their mass were refined, the supposed deviations turned out to be an error.
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u/eb6069 13h ago
So, is it not possible to view Neptune through a standard earth bound telescope?
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u/scalyblue 13h ago
Neptune has an apparent magnitude of just under 8, impossible to see with the naked eye, with an 8 inch telescope you might see a tiny blue dot, but Neptune is barely over 2 arc seconds wide so emphasis on tiny, it’s basically something you’d never find unless you know where you expect it to be
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u/eb6069 13h ago
Thank you.
I always assumed we could find anything in our solar system by conventional means, that is very interesting.
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u/United_Spread_3918 12h ago
Then you might find reading about the planet 9 stuff. Growing belief that the math supports yet another planet in our solar system that we haven’t detected yet. Far out there, but it’s interesting that even today we still have that uncertainty even about the stuff relatively closest to us
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u/Jbell_1812 15h ago
How was an entire planet discovered witn math? I'm not trying to be mean I'm genuinely curious
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u/HillbillyTechno 15h ago
Something along the lines of, they detected it’s presence because of the gravitational effect it had on other planets orbit, they used math to determine there had to be another large mass and roughly where it should be.
Edit: I’m a Joe shmo so someone who knows more about it feel free to pop in and correct me
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u/biblionoob 15h ago
Hi il someone who kind of know, we do that in H.S physics class. Its not that complicated you can do that with vector. Like determining the mass of the sun by studying earth orbit kind of stuff. Its widely impressive to me how smart they were to determine those equation and find the math behind it.
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u/revelent018 14h ago
Neptune was discovered this way actually. Uranus's orbit was acting funky, and some people calculated the mass and position of an object required to cause the perturbation seen in Uranus's orbit. Some years later, someone pointed a telescope at that spot and lo and behold, there is Neptune.
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u/ZHISHER 14h ago
Long story short, they knew used math to figure out exactly how Uranus should move (it’s mass, distance from the Earth, etc.)
When they saw it not moving like that, they realized there must be another planet close by affecting it’s gravity
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u/rhabarberabar 14h ago edited 54m ago
square normal march bike disgusted serious sip governor label sort
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/Infinite-Condition41 15h ago
That literally doesn't mean anything, because there is no such thing as a consistent flat earther, much less a group of them.
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u/phoenix-born49erfan 11h ago
I've been to flagstaff az and seen the actual telescope used to discover Pluto. Pretty cool spot
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u/TulioGonzaga 16h ago
Why did they use a Japanese telescope in 1994?
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u/Archon-Toten 16h ago
If space quest taught me anything, it's space is pixelated.
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u/CallMeDrWorm42 10h ago
I know you're joking, but space is un-ironically pixelated. Sorta. If we think of a pixel in a game like space quest as being the smallest length of a thing that can be represented, we have the Planck length in real life. It is the smallest unit of length theoretically possible. Nothing can be shorter than the Planck length. You could think of it as being the "resolution" of reality.
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u/mattoelite 11h ago
I read that it hasn’t even completed a rotation around the sun since it was discovered? Incredible
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u/AshelyWeinerdogowner 4h ago
a rainbow and a heart. pluto is LGBTQ and the world rejoices!
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u/Thom5001 16h ago
Yet we still don’t have a clear image of a UFO 🙄
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u/MrUniverse1990 16h ago
Getting a clear image of a UFO is, by definition, impossible. UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object, and if you have a clear image of something, you can identify it.
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u/ThrowFar_Far_Away 15h ago
Well no, if it actually is from outer space then you would still not be able to identify it. Since we would have no idea what it is.
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u/ExplanationCrazy5463 14h ago edited 13h ago
They don't want us to and they have the technology to prevent it.
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u/splitinfinitive22222 10h ago
It was a real headtrip when I learned that space/heavenly bodies probably don't look like that to the naked eye, and that all our satellite images are visually interpreted from streams of data.
I think, like most people, I believed that the data being sent back was literal image files.
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u/NotPromKing 9h ago
This makes me think of those pictures of zygotes. First it’s just a fertilized egg, then it’s four cells, then 16 cells, and soon it looks like an actual fetus.
Replaced cells with pixels and the analogy is close enough, right?
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u/WolFlow2021 9h ago
Yeah, no matter how much rouge and blue eye shadow you apply to this guy it's still not a planet. So beat it, bozos.
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u/Bac0nJuice 9h ago
Why do the pixels on the 1996 one wrap around the curvature of the surface? And not in a perfect grid like other camera sensors?
And also why is the edge perfectly sharp when you can clearly see the pixel resolution???
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u/OgdruJahad 8h ago
Someone in 1996 :"Hey what if I subdivide the surface to make it smooth?"
Computer:"Computer says no. "
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u/Taptrick 8h ago
4th image is screaming “I know nothing about astronomy and did not bother educating myself before posting this”.
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u/dieselboy93 1h ago
someone went to pluto and vandalized it with colors in 2018, we need to go back there and remove that
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u/halcyann 15h ago
"2018" is just a false color image from the same New Horizons mission