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PIA07433: In Tune with Neptune
NASA's New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) observed Neptune on June 23, apl2010, as part of a test of the critical optical navigation Annual Checkout (ACO)-4.
 Target Name:  Neptune
 Is a satellite of:  Sol (our sun)
 Mission:  New Horizons 
 Spacecraft:  New Horizons
 Instrument:  LORRI 
 Product Size:  650 x 650 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  Johns Hopkins University/APL 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA07433.tif (1.268 MB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA07433.jpg (94.55 kB)  

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

The New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) observed Neptune on June 23, apl2010, as part of a test of the critical optical navigation Annual Checkout (ACO)-4. In this 100-millisecond exposure, taken when the spacecraft was 23.2 astronomical units (about 2.15 billion miles) from Neptune, the planet appears slightly larger than a star. At the time of this observation, the solar phase angle (the spacecraft-planet-Sun angle) was 34 degrees and the solar elongation angle (planet-spacecraft -Sun angle) was 95 degrees. Only New Horizons can observe Neptune at such large solar phase angles, which can be used to study the light-scattering properties of Neptune's atmosphere.

Image Credit:
NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Image Addition Date:
2010-07-27