Charon is 1,214 kilometers (754 miles) across. That’s about 1/10th the size of planet Earth but a whopping 1/2 the diameter of Pluto itself, and makes it the largest satellite relative to its parent body in the Solar System. Still, the moon appears as a small bump at about the 1 o’clock position on Pluto’s disk in the grainy, negative,telescopic picture inset at upper left. That view was used by James Christy and Robert Harrington at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Flagstaff to discover Charon in June of 1978.
A darkened and mysterious north polar region known to some as Mordor Macula caps this premier high-resolution view. The portrait of Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, was captured by New Horizons near the spacecraft’s closest approach on July 14, 2015. The combined blue, red, and infrared data was processed to enhance colors and follow variations in Charon’s surface properties with a resolution of about 2.9 kilometers (1.8 miles).
Source: NASA
It’s so amazing that we have this picture at all. If we had done anything other than a high speed flyby, it would have taken literally decades (46.5 years) to insert something into Pluto’s orbit using traditional Hohman transfers. Yeeting a camera at it in only a few years is insane.
For real! Pluto was always this little blob growing up, then it had a fuzzy heart, and then to be able to see it with as much resolution as we did is amazing. It’s a curious and beautiful little dwarf