There are so many things to see. Look at all those haze layers! Or maybe it's an optical illusion, fewer layers with vertical waves that make them seem alternately thicker and thinner. Look at the pointy peaky mountains and how we can see into their shadows because of twilight. Look at the boundaries between rugged mountains and smooth plains. Look at the flow fields in the plains. Look at the mountains poised atop Pluto's curvature. You never see a view like that on Earth because Earth is so much bigger than its mountains; even the Moon is not so rugged. Look at the mountains casting shadows into Pluto's night. And just look, look, look at how much detail there is.

The NASA release accompanying this image does a great job explaining some of the features you can see in it, so I won't rehash that here -- go read it for yourself! Instead, I'll tell you more about how this picture was made, and why it's different from previous Pluto images you've seen.

The detail is there because this is a very large image. Nearly all of the Pluto photos we've seen so far are from New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, LORRI. The photo above is our first high-resolution view of Pluto from New Horizons' other camera, Ralph. Ralph itself is two different cameras; the one used for this photo is the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera, or MVIC. I usually refer to MVIC as New Horizons' color camera, but that's a bit sloppy of me. Color isn't all that MVIC does, and it doesn't always do color.

LORRI is a simple camera to understand -- it's point and shoot. It is black-and-white, with a square detector, 1024 pixels square, over an extremely narrow field of view of 0.29 degrees. It has special optics designed to prevent distortion in the image. Choose how long you want the exposure to be (1 to 10,000 milliseconds), then point and shoot, and you have an image. Sometimes, to keep file sizes small and improve signal in low light situations, you can bin LORRI images 4x4, so the resulting pictures are 256 pixels square. That's pretty much it for LORRI.

MVIC is quite different from LORRI. Like many space cameras (including HiRISE and CTX on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and LROC on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter), it is a pushbroom imager, meaning that instead of pointing and shooting, you sweep a linear detector array across a surface, building up a long, skinny image swath over time. It's sort of the same way that a photocopier or scanner works. The detector is 5024 pixels wide, of which 5000 are actually photoactive, so its images are 5000 pixels wide by an arbitrary number of pixels long.

The 5000 pixels are spread across a 5.7-degree field of view. If you do the math you'll find that individual MVIC pixels are almost exactly four times wider than LORRI pixels, and MVIC images cover a field that is nearly 20 times wider than a LORRI image. So that big mosaic of Pluto that I posted on Tuesday, which took a 4-by-4 array of LORRI images to make, would occupy less than one-fifth of the width of the MVIC field of view. Here's a diagram that shows how all the fields of view overlap on the sky.