Cthulhu Region on Pluto

The New Horizons unmanned spacecraft, now traveling through the Kuiper's Belt, in July 2015 and once it finished sending back some engineering data, started transmitting selections from its huge storehouse of images of Pluto and its moons.

The featured frame, a digital composite, shows a surprising terrain filled with craters, plains, landscape of unknown character, and landforms that resemble something on Earth but that were quite unexpected on Pluto.

The light area sprawling across the upper right has been dubbed Sputnik Planum and is being studied for its unusual smoothness, while the dark cratered area just under the spacecraft is known as Cthulhu.

(note: Cthulhu is a legendary Cosmic Entity created by the American visionary poet and writer H.P. Lovecraft. He first appeared in the 1928 short story "The Call of Cthulhu", published in the pulp magazine Weird Talesdark)