Real images of Mars used for stunning fictive flyover video

While humans aren’t able to visit Mars just yet, a video gives us a remarkable picture of what it would look like if we could.

Astronomy enthusiast Jan Fröjdman created a fictive flyover video of the planet, rendered from real photos. It was published two weeks ago on the website Vimeo and has been watched more than 35,000 times.

“This film is not scientific,” he writes in the text that accompanies the video. “As a space enthusiast, I have just tried to visualize the planet my way.”

Using images taken by NASA’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, which was on-board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Fröjdman processed the pictures into panning video clips. The result makes viewers feel like they’re getting a birds-eye view of Mars. It reveals a range of vast, beige-tinted landscapes, from pockets of deep craters to cascading cliffs and a plethora of geometrical textures.

The project took three months to complete and involved manually choosing 30,000 reference points on the anaglyph image pairs.

“There are really great places on Mars,” writes Fröjdman. “I would love to see images taken by a landscape photographer on Mars, especially from the polar regions. But I’m afraid I won’t see that kind of images during my lifetime.”