Full Resolution OK -- this is Usain Bolt, running fast at the Rio 2016 Olympics. But what I love about it is that this is the exact same photo at we took at Arrokoth.
In the Usain Bolt shot, the photographer used a long exposure (1/30 sec), and panned the camera to follow Usain, to get a sharp image of his face, and a blurred background.
In the Arrokoth shot, we did the same thing. Arrokoth and our spacecraft were both moving. We took a long exposure to get enough photons, so we kept the shutter open. And this only worked because we slewed the spacecraft at exactly the same speed as the target was moving. You can see the blurred stars in the background, like the motion blur in Rio. But the camera motion exactly compensates, so the target -- Usain, or Arrokoth -- is sharp.
What made the Arrokoth shot even harder was that we were flying in the dark, at 30,000 kph, at a tiny, dark target we'd never seen before, that we didn't know where it was, and we had one shot to do it right.
