Pluto was discovered on February 18, 1930, by Clyde W. Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Since then many pictures have been taken but none as stunning as the incoming imagery from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. Even the mighty Hubble Space Telescope could only capture blurry representations of the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object orbiting the Sun.
This might seem contradictory because Hubble can capture brilliant, crisp images of galaxies thousands and millions of light years away. One has to remember that these distant objects are immense whereas Pluto is extremely tiny in comparison. When Hubble takes a picture of Pluto, it only occupies about 2.5 pixels in the image whereas an entire galaxy could fill the entire field of view!
Source: https://twitter.com/NASAGoddard/
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