Pluto Through a Stained Glass Window: New Movie of the Tiny Planet (VIDEO)

First Posted: Dec 28, 2015 08:06 AM EST

As NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto, it recorded spectacular images of the icy world's surface using its LORRI and MVIC cameras. Now, researchers are getting a "movie" of this historic flyby in color-sort of.

One instrument was designed to measure the composition of Pluto's and Charon's surfaces, and it did something that researchers didn't expect; it recorded the first movies from the edge of the solar system. Recorded with a 256 x 256 camera at under two frames per second, they may not be the best quality, but they are movies.

The instrument itself is called LEISA. It takes 2D images like a normal camera, but then takes these images through a linearly-varying filter. One side of the camera can only see light of one specific wavelength of infrared light and each row of pixels can see a subtly different wavelength.

This linear filter allows light with wavelengths as short as 1.25 microns to fall on one side of the image sensor, and smoothly changes to allow light with wavelengths as long as 2.5 microns to fall on the far side of the image sensor. Human eyes can perceive light with wavelengths as short as .39 microns.

The effect is a bit like looking through a stained glass window designed for infrared eyes. By scanning this image sensor with its linear filter across a scene and quickly recording many images during the scan, LEISA builds up a 2D map of the scene in front of the camera with a measurement of the infrared spectrum at every location in the image.

For more information about the New Horizons mission, visit NASA's website.

Want to see the movie for yourself? Check out the video below.