How is it that we can see depth on a planet? This is Pluto in a Minute! With Dr. Brian May!

Have you guys ever stopped to think that we have two eyes but cameras only have one lens? There's a really easy way to see what the limitation of one lens is. If you hold a pen out in front of you at arm's length and alternately close your left and right eye, you see the pen appear to move against whatever is behind it. The pen of course isn't moving, your eye is just seeing it at a different point. So when you have a camera like LORRI on New Horizons, it only have one of those view points. You don't get the same depth.

We evolved with two eyes, and a miracle happens every single second of your life. You get two separate pictures of the world reaching your brain coming from the two different eyes and your brain puts them together and makes an incredibly stereoscopic in depth view of the universe around you.

A stereoscope reproduces that, that's the theory, and it's been known since 1850 that you can so this. So we have here a stereoscopic image of...

... guess what? Pluto! And it's the first -- probably the first -- real stereoscopic picture of Pluto in the entire universe. To have this, to make this you have to have two different viewpoints, and that's what we have from this incredible Pluto mission, this New Horizons mission. And I was lucky enough to be in the room when these came down so I was able to put them together. And if you look into here, what do you see, Amy?

You see... a phenomenal sphere jumping off, off of the page! This is so cool! (laughs) And all kinds of surface detail! You can see more surface detail than you can in a straight image. Now...

Yeah, stereoscope is magic, magic that happens ever moment of your life so why not use it for photography.

And can you tell us what we will learn when we get more stereoscopic images from Pluto?

Stereoscopic images are fun, they are very real they make you feel like you're there, but they also give you a lot of information because you can get heights from this and you can get the whole shape of the mountain ranges, you can establish the depth of the craters, and the rilles or whatever, you know...

New Horizons will eventually send back dedicated images for stereoscopic data. In the meantime, we'll have to make our own.

See Dr. May's images at http://www.brianmay.com/brian/brianss...

Alright, to learn more about Pluto check out the New Horizons websites, join the conversation online with the hashtag #PlutoFlyby, and of course, come back here every day for more Pluto in a Minute.

http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu