Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Pluto Ho!

Amidst all the controversy surrounding Pluto's designation, a spacecraft named New Horizons is on its way out there, to swing by and then explore the Kuiper belt. This week it opened its camera for the first time and took a picture of M7, an open cluster in our galaxy.



The camera's detection level included stars as faint as 12th magnitude, which shows the camera is operating at expected sensitivity.

Now we just have another 9 years till it swings by Pluto.

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