This photo of Pluto ...

[hoohaw]

Off topic, but I don't know who else to ask: This photo of Pluto,
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015 ... .html?_r=0
shows what looks exactly like farm fields all over the place on Pluto.
My question is a basic one: are these "fields" physical (real), or, somehow, are they image-processing artifacts? Anyone know? I have not seen ANY comments on them, e.g comments on the farming habits of the Plutocrats.

[bystander]

Off topic, but I don't know who else to ask: This photo of Pluto, ...

So post in an APOD about Pluto, Open Space, The Asterisk Café, or even the New Horizons thread, not in a thread that has nothing to do with Pluto.

[Chris Peterson]

Off topic, but I don't know who else to ask: This photo of Pluto,
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015 ... .html?_r=0
shows what looks exactly like farm fields all over the place on Pluto.
My question is a basic one: are these "fields" physical (real), or, somehow, are they image-processing artifacts? Anyone know? I have not seen ANY comments on them, e.g comments on the farming habits of the Plutocrats.

They're processing artifacts. Probably JPEG artifacts (JPEG compression works by breaking the image up into blocks, typically 8x8 pixels, which is what we have here). In this case, these are most likely compression artifacts in the original data, subsequently rotated for presentation.