NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has sent back more great images of Pluto, and these are a real treat.
First, NASA has taken a bunch of close-up images showing two parts of Pluto, and assembled those images into a simulated continuous flyby.
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On this video, you first see the "fly over" of Pluto's icy Sputnik Plain, which was named after the 1957 Russian satellite Sputnik -- the first ever to reach Earth orbit.
The second "fly over" is Hillary Mountains, named after Sir Edmund Hillary… the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest in 1953.
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This last still image (below) is incredible. After flying past Pluto, New Horizons pointed its camera back at the dwarf planet. Backlit by the sun, Pluto's atmosphere rings its silhouette like a luminous halo in this image taken around midnight EDT on July 15. This global portrait of the atmosphere was captured when the spacecraft was about 1.25 million miles from Pluto. The image, delivered to Earth on July 23rd, is displayed with north at the top of the frame.