                        Astronomy Picture of the Day

    Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our
      fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation
                    written by a professional astronomer.

                                 2025 May 19

                      Charon Flyover from New Horizons
      Video Credit: NASA, JHUAPL, SwRI, P. Schenk & J. Blackwell (LPI);
                            Music: Juicy by ALBIS

   Explanation: What if you could fly over Pluto's moon Charon -- what
   might you see? The New Horizons spacecraft did just this in 2015 July
   as it zipped past Pluto and Charon with cameras blazing. The images
   recorded allowed for a digital reconstruction of much of Charon's
   surface, further enabling the creation of fictitious flights over
   Charon created from this data. One such fanciful, minute-long,
   time-lapse video is shown here with vertical heights and colors of
   surface features digitally enhanced. Your journey begins over a wide
   chasm that divides different types of Charon's landscapes, a chasm that
   might have formed when Charon froze through. You soon turn north and
   fly over a colorful depression dubbed Mordor that, one hypothesis
   holds, is an unusual remnant from an ancient impact. Your voyage
   continues over an alien landscape rich with never-before-seen craters,
   mountains, and crevices. The robotic New Horizons spacecraft has too
   much momentum to ever return to Pluto and Charon and is now headed out
   of our Solar System.

                   Portal Universe: Random APOD Generator
                       Tomorrow's picture: volcano sky
     __________________________________________________________________

       Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
            NASA Official: Amber Straughn Specific rights apply.
                  NASA Web Privacy, Accessibility, Notices;
                      A service of: ASD at NASA / GSFC,
                           NASA Science Activation
                             & Michigan Tech. U.

