Charon by Plutolight

In a long list of really unusual images of Pluto's big moon Charon taken by the New Horizons spacecraft, the one above may be the unusualest. And most poetic. It's Charon, lit by Plutolight. Let me explain. Pluto is so far from the Sun -- three billion kilometers -- that to it, the Earth and Sun are basically in the same direction. Even though the probe picked up a boost by swinging past Jupiter, it still is on a trajectory that's basically pointing away from the Sun. So it passed through the ...