Well, that high resolution instrument, the same that snapped the picture above, is not exactly a camera like we're used to think of them. It's a single telescope that "feeds" two different detection instruments (by way of mirrors), each of which has several arrays of detector elements (CCDs) sensible to different wavelengths of light: blue (400-550 nm), red (540-700 nm), near IR (780 – 975 nm), narrow band methane (860 – 910 nm), what you have. Note no "green", probably because planets other than Earth offer very little interesting data to gather in that band. Even the CCDs are not what we're used to: they capture "stripes" of 5000 and change pixels width but only 30 or so pixels height. The sampling is synchronised with the motion of the spacecraft so that stripes can be joined and produce images like the above.
So anyway, the point is, when this instrument "snaps a picture," what it really produces are distinct, independent feeds of data from all the sensors. These are beamed back to Earth, and here scientists can reconstruct the visible spectrum to produce "human eye" colour photographs for all of us, while still having access to the "unmixed" components for their research.
Well, that high resolution instrument, the same that snapped the picture above, is not exactly a camera like we're used to think of them. It's a single telescope that "feeds" two different detection instruments (by way of mirrors), each of which has several arrays of detector elements (CCDs) sensible to different wavelengths of light: blue (400-550 nm), red (540-700 nm), near IR (780 – 975 nm), narrow band methane (860 – 910 nm), what you have. Note no "green", probably because planets other than Earth offer very little interesting data to gather in that band. Even the CCDs are not what we're used to: they capture "stripes" of 5000 and change pixels width but only 30 or so pixels height. The sampling is synchronised with the motion of the spacecraft so that stripes can be joined and produce images like the above.
So anyway, the point is, when this instrument "snaps a picture," what it really produces are distinct, independent feeds of data from all the sensors. These are beamed back to Earth, and here scientists can reconstruct the visible spectrum to produce "human eye" colour photographs for all of us, while still having access to the "unmixed" components for their research.
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory has a nice page detailing the science payload of New Horizons. If you're curious: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Mission/Spacecraft/Payload.php
And if you want the gory technical data, dive in this paper by the people who developed the gadget: http://www.boulder.swri.edu/pkb/ssr/ssr-ralph.pdf