Views of Our Planets and Pluto Explored! and similar items

Includes ONE Views of the Planets Forever 47 | Sheet of 16 Includes ONE Pluto Explored!Forever 47 | Souvenir Sheet of 4 Items are brand new, mint and never hinged! Ships with care and a tracking number! All purchases final! View of our Planets: During the modern era of space exploration, the planets of our solar system have been viewed with increasing clarity, thanks to the distant voyages of unmanned spacecraft and the development of ever-more powerful telescopes. With this pane of 16 stamps, the U.S. Postal Service showcases some of the more visually compelling full-disk images of the planets obtained during this era. Eight new colorful Forever stamps, each shown twice, feature Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Some show the planet’s “true” color—what we might see with our own eyes if traveling through space. Others use colors to represent and visualize certain features of a planet based on imaging data. Still others use the near-infrared spectrum to show things that cannot be seen by the human eye in visible light. Verso text explains what these images reveal and identifies the spacecrafts and powerful telescopes that helped obtain them. Art director Antonio Alcala designed the stamps. PLUTO EXPLORED: This stamp celebrates NASA's history-making first reconnaissance of Pluto in 2015 by the New Horizons mission. The Pluto–Explored! souvenir sheet contains two stamp designs. One shows an artist's rendering of the New Horizons spacecraft. The other shows the spacecraft's striking image of Pluto taken near closest approach. The view—which is color-enhanced to highlight surface texture and composition—is a composite of four images from New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), combined with color data from the imaging instrument Ralph. It clearly reveals the now-famous heart-shaped feature that measures about 1,000 miles across at its widest point. The Pluto flyby completes a historic, half-century era of solar system reconnaissance by the United States. After NASA probed every planet out to Neptune between 1962 and 1989, it took another quarter century to reach Pluto. The United States, through NASA, has been the first nation to explore each of the planets. The New Horizons mission to Pluto and the vast region beyond Neptune called the Kuiper Belt is one of the great explorations of history. Antonio Antonio Alcala was the art director and designer of the sheet.