What would it be like to stand on Pluto: what would we see, what would we feel? Would Pluto be useful as a launch pad for spacecraft to go to other Kuiper belt objects, to the Oort cloud and even to the stars?

TO STAND ON PLUTO

The sky

The distances from Pluto to the stars are so very much greater than from Pluto to the Earth, that the same constellations will appear in Pluto's sky as in the Earth's sky, and the same Milky Way, all with the same relative brightnesses. The retrograde rotation of Pluto means that the stars will rise in the West and set in the East. The solar day on Pluto, as on the Earth, is the time between successive noons (at noon the Sun is at its maximum altitude). On Earth this interval is one (solar) day. Pluto's axial rotation period is longer than that of the Earth, and therefore the solar day is longer, 6.387 Earth days. The Sun, planets, and stars thus move considerably more slowly across Pluto's sky than across our skies.

The rotation axis on Earth is directed at a point in the northerly sky near the fairly bright star Polaris (the Pole Star), which is a little under 1° from the exact point around which the sky appears to rotate. On Pluto the corresponding point is about 15° East from the bright star Altair.