There is now a stunning flyby video of Jupiter—created out of dozens of still photographs taken by the Juno probe.
Junocam is a camera mounted on the spacecraft Juno, which is currently orbiting Jupiter on the first mission to circle the polar regions of the planet.
Every 53 days, Juno dips into a low altitude of just 2,600 miles and records six megabytes of data and imagery during that two hour flight.
NASA recently released the images from Juno’s pass earlier this month.
Gerald Eichstaedt, a mathematician who lives in Stuffgart, Germany, saw the images and decided to spend 60 hours combining 36 images into video with a software program he wrote. According to Wired, the software uses “Juno’s trajectory data to determine the millisecond the probe’s precise location when it made each image, then places that image on a spherical model of the planet.”
Eichstaedt then uploaded his video to unmannedpsaceflight.com, where Seán Doran, an animator and filmmaker in London, saw it. The latter then decided to spend 12 hours smoothing and enhancing each of the 2,400 frames in the video and added an eerie soundtrack for good measure.
Juno launched on April 5, 2011 but only entered into Jupiter’s orbit on June 4, 2016. The mission’s goal is to illuminate the origin and evolution of Jupiter.
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