Nasa has released this stunning but incomplete image of Pluto's crescent, taken 15 minutes after the New Horizons spacecraft made its closest pass by Pluto in July this year, as the spacecraft looked back at Pluto toward the sun. Nasa says: "The wide-angle perspective of this view shows the deep haze layers of Pluto's atmosphere extending all the way around Pluto, revealing the silhouetted profiles of rugged plateaus on the night [left] side.
"The shadow of Pluto cast on its atmospheric hazes can also be seen at the uppermost part of the disc. On the sunlit side of Pluto [right], the smooth expanse of the informally named icy plain Sputnik Planum is flanked to the west [above, in this orientation] by rugged mountains up to 3500m high."
It continues: "The backlighting highlights more than a dozen high-altitude layers of haze in Pluto's tenuous atmosphere. The horizontal streaks in the sky beyond Pluto are stars, smeared out by the motion of the camera as it tracked Pluto. The image was taken ... from a distance of 18,000km to Pluto."
