Let's all take a second to appreciate the fact that this newest photo of Pluto was taken more than 1 million miles away from the icy dwarf planet. That's how far away New Horizons will be tonight at 11:23 PM EST, on its way to an historic flyby on Tuesday morning.
You might be fooled into thinking Pluto and Charon look really similar, comparing this photo to the latest images of the big moon in the post below. But keep in mind that these images are uncolored, taken by New Horizons' black-and-white LORRI camera. Once the team has the chance to add in color data from the Ralph camera, the differences between the planet and its moon become clear: Pluto is reddish-orange (not blue, like you might have thought), and Charon is more muted gray.
What's really cool about these two is they are the only known planet/moon pair with a similar origin to Earth and its Moon. "This is the only other example of a giant impact planetary system," says Alan Stern, New Horizons' principal investigator. Of course the difference between the Earth system and the Pluto system being that the latter has many other moons in addition to Charon.
