Love the pic of Jim Christy in his study btw. I can never resist deciphering the contents of someone's book case. The heavily bookmarked Penrose seems to be one of his favorites. :)
Why is it so surprising? We didn’t had the ability to image pluto well until then heck the best image we had until new horizons was a few pixels.
Pluto is tiny Charon is even smaller at those distances you can’t get any clear images of such small objects.
Charon’s orbit is also technically not around Pluto as it’s slightly over half it’s mass they both Orbit each other which made it much harder to detect.
And as far as Pluto goes afaik we don’t have its orbit fully mapped yet either.
We were kinda lucky in that 1979-1999 was the period where Pluto’s orbit passes inside of Neptune’s orbit which meant that we actually could image it at resolutions slightly better than a single speck.
