Astronomy

Pluto's Pre-Photography Render

Karl Abate

Karl Abate

— 2 min read
The highest-quality images of Pluto before the New Horizons space probe reached it in July 2015. It's a sphere covered with fuzzy black and yellow blobs.

The thing that really made me get into astronomy was videos that compared the sizes of objects. The first one I ever saw was by JXGaming as a kid, and I was absolutely obsessed with them for years since.

There is something about these older videos, though, that I didn't notice at all but in retrospect is very obvious. What render did they use for Pluto?

For a while the best image we had of Pluto (pictured above) was just a sphere with black and yellow smudges. Meanwhile, the first actual photographs of Pluto were taken by the New Horizons space probe in July 2015. So where did this grey object come from in all of these videos before that?

A collage of four images of space comparison videos, all showing the weird grey render of Pluto. The videos are made by JXGaming, rawn100, Kiss Péter, and Gustav Engman.

Well! My brain works in very silly ways, and I actually managed to identify where that specific model of Pluto came from. The image felt way too real to be completely made up, and the icy shapes seemed way too familiar, and after a bit of not-so-thorough thinking I found out what the source is!

The asset is actually taken directly from Ganymede, the largest moon of the Solar System. I found some very old 3D models of Pluto with that same texture in TurboSquid, and it's very easy to compare it and see that it is literally just Ganymede but desaturated to be grey.

The clearest place to spot the similarity to me is the two dark patches seemingly divided by a line that points to a big white crater. Of course the general icy textures everywhere also match.

A comparison between Ganymede (right) and the false render of Pluto (left) to scale. They use the exact same texture but Ganymede is brown, while Pluto is very grey.

So that's the "discovery" I made! Not super crazy but I just find it very interesting to find the reasoning behind things like this.

It was purely coincidental that I wrote this just 2 days after the 19th anniversary of Pluto being reclassified, maybe I should've written it earlier, but whatever!

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