On 31/12/2018 18:14, wrote:
If NASA will be showing photographs from the spacecraft as it flies
past 'Ultima Thule' tonight I would be interested in watching.
However, I do not wish to watch if all I'm going to see are talking
heads, computer simulations, etc. How soon will photographs be
released from the period of close approach?

Light travel time alone is about 6 hours and then they will need to send
an image on a downlink that runs at 1000bps. So a 2Mpixel snapshot at
100bytes/second will optimisitically take about 20000s = 6 hours to
arrive. They can't start sending until it has completed the flyby since
its high gain antenna must be pointed back at the Earth.

There might be a first snapshot very late today or early tomorrow with a
bit of luck. It will be interesting to see what it looks like.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown