Where are Clarke Montes on Charon?
Clarke Montes are centered at 5.12° south, 7.05° east, on Vulcan Planitia, the smooth, lower plains that fill the southern half of the hemisphere New Horizons saw up close. They lie south of the belt of canyons, about 24 degrees of longitude west of Kubrick Mons, the other mountain in a moat. The International Astronomical Union adopted the name in 2018, after Arthur C. Clarke; his collaborator on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick, gave his name to that neighbor.
How high are Clarke Montes?
Up to about 4 kilometers above the moat around them. The New Horizons team found that these mountains rise abruptly from the plains and stand 2.5 to 3 kilometers above them, but 3.7 to 4 kilometers above the depressed moats that surround them. Mountains like these are seen only east of 0° longitude on the plains. How they formed is not settled: one idea is that they are blocks of Charon's broken crust that sank into the material that flooded the plains, pressing a moat into it around them.
What do Clarke Montes look like as a 3D print?
Steep blocks in a trench. Their entry frames about 159 kilometers, the smallest region Charon allows and all of it on the sharpest ground New Horizons measured, so on a model 200 millimeters across the relief in that view comes out at about 7 millimeters at true scale and about 14 millimeters at the 2x Charon models start at. The range, 75 kilometers across, fills about half of the model's width. A faint north-south line, where two strips of New Horizons images meet, can show at 2x. Ground this sharp is only about a fifth of Charon; the north polar cap, for one, prints as streaks.
What is OrbitStudio?
OrbitStudio turns real elevation data into 3D-printable models. You pick a region of Charon on a globe or a flat map, choose a jigsaw puzzle or a solid ornament, and get ready-to-print files with terrain and borders already separated and colored. No CAD, no mesh repair. The heights come from New Horizons' stereo topography, posted at 300 meters per pixel.
Trying it is free and needs no account: pick a region, generate it and turn it around in 3D. Downloading the model — STL files and pre-colored 3MF files for Bambu Studio or OrcaSlicer — takes a Plus or Merchant plan, or one credit from a pass. The generator covers the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Venus and Pluto too.
Other landmarks
The night sky, too
OrbitStudio Sky, the night-sky tool, turns the sky over any place, on any date from 1900 to 2100, into a 3D-printable star map. Its STL is free.