Pluto and Charon, the largest of Pluto's five known moons, seen January 25 (left) and 27 (right), 2015, through the telescopic Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. New Horizons was about 126 million miles (203 million kilometers) from Pluto when the frames to make the first image were taken and about 1.5 million miles (2.5 million kilometers) closer for the second set. Pluto and Charon subtended 2 pixels and 1 pixel, respectively, in LORRI's field of view. The image was magnified four times to make Pluto and Charon more visible, though during the next several months, the apparent sizes of Pluto and Charon, as well as the separation between them, will continue to expand in the LORRI images. The image exposure time was only a tenth of a second, which is too short to detect Pluto's smaller moons. LORRI will also be taking images with longer exposure times (10 seconds) that should reveal both Nix and Hydra.
NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI