"Today Marc Buie, a devoted Plutophile at the Southwest Research Institute, unveiled maps of Pluto's surface that he derived from Hubble Space Telescope images taken over a 13-month stretch in 2002 and 2003. When compared to a comparable set of Hubble snapshots from 1994, it's clear that the icy surface of this distant world has gone through some big changes. Four years of processing by 20 computers have turned a set of Hubble Space Telescope images of Pluto, each only a few pixels wide, into this map of its complex surface. Numbers show the longitude of the central meridian. Click on the animation to see three enlarged frames with a scale bar and coordinate grids. NASA / ESA / Mark Buie The new views reveal a surface with three distinct coatings: nearly white areas that are likely a mixture of methane and nitrogen frosts, and terrains that look dark orange and charcoal black, which probably contain complex organic compounds created by constant exposure to radiation." - Keith Pelczarski