The picture in question:
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/g6gz8g/pluto_in_1994_and_in_2018/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
In: Technology
If you take longer to record the picture, you’ll be able to capture more light with the camera.
To take a bright picture of dimly lit object, you just need to wait longer, until enough light has been recorded.
The risk is that you’ll move while the picture is being taken, resulting in a fuzzy picture. But it’s easy to not move too much or to stabilize the camera when floating in space.
Long exposure, and stacked images. This is the same way we get beautiful images of deep space objects
Pluto is fairly well lit, mostly because the sun is stupidly bright, and the cameras on the probes are optimized for lower light levels than a camera on Earth would be.
Pluto is about as well lit as the surface of the Earth just after sunset but before it gets really dark. This means that it’s better lit than the inside of most offices(your eyes are weird so it may not seem that way) and combined with a large camera at close range with longer exposures you can capture plenty of light to make it look well lit.
NASA cameras also use a cheat to get better pictures. Instead of a sensor with Red, Green, and Blue elements on it they have multiple skinny sensors that capture a narrow strip of Red, a strip of Blue, a strip of Near IR, and then they overlay all of those strips and stitch them together. This gives them more sensitive and lower noise sensors for each color band, and more wavelengths than you can see with your eye to let them add some details.
NASA paid scientists at JHU/APL to build a spaceship and fly it all the way to Pluto. That spaceship contained a camera, called [Lorri](http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Mission/Spacecraft.php#Payload ), which was specially engineered to take pictures at the light levels expected at Pluto. It’s not some off-the-shelf smartphone camera.
From the post you cite:
>It’s quite amazing how much detail is added when you can get the camera 5 billion km closer.
Pluto isn’t as dark as you might think. The sun is 1500x dimmer than on the earth, but that is still more than 500x brighter than the moon. The surface would appear as twilight to someone standing there, and with no other light sources around, your eyes would quickly adjust. A sensitive camera would have no problem taking good pictures.
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