Pluto Real Color

This single color MVIC scan includes no data from other New Horizons imagers or instruments added. The striking features on Pluto are clearly visible, including the bright expanse of Pluto's icy, nitrogen-and-methane rich "heart," Sputnik Planitia. Explore the true color version of Pluto's giant moon, Charon.

Thanks to the New Horizons mission, which conducted the first detailed study of Pluto in 2014, we know that Pluto's color is rather diverse, with patches of white, yellow and reddish. The colour of Pluto depends on how you observe it, but New Horizons and Hubble have revealed the dwarf planet's rich typography and hues. It's hard to make a true-color family portrait of the solar system.

It turns out that most photos of planets aren't true colors! Here's my attempt, using the best NASA photos I could find. This natural-color image of Pluto results from refined calibration of data gathered by New Horizons' color Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC). The processing creates images that would approximate the colors that the human eye would perceive, bringing them closer to "true color" than the images released near the encounter.

What color is Pluto, really? It took some effort to figure out. Even given all of the images sent back to Earth when the robotic New Horizons spacecraft sped past Pluto in 2015, processing these multi-spectral frames to approximate what the human eye would see was challenging. The result featured here, released three years after the raw data was acquired by New Horizons, is the highest.

From the slate gray of Mercury to the ruddy brown of Pluto, the worlds in our solar system are a veritable rainbow of colors. But what makes them all look so different? New Horizons scientists combined the latest black and white map of Pluto's surface features (left) with a map of the planet's colors (right) to produce a detailed color portrait of the planet's northern hemisphere (center).

Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI What color is Pluto? The answer, revealed in the first maps made from New Horizons data, turns out to be shades of reddish brown. Although. (The lower right edge of Pluto in this view currently lacks high-resolution color coverage.) The images, taken when the spacecraft was 280,000 miles (450,000 kilometers) away, show features as small as 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers), twice the resolution of the single.

Unveiling Pluto's True Colors: A Cosmic Enigma For decades, the enigmatic dwarf planet Pluto remained a distant, blurry point of light. Our understanding of its surface features and true hues was largely speculative. All of that changed with the arrival of NASA's New Horizons mission, which revolutionized our perception of this distant world.