Modern scientists now have a pretty good idea of what Mars looks like, but beyond what you've seen in the movies, you probably don't. At least, you're probably not going to sift through 50,000 NASA photos while wearing 3D glasses to get a full picture of it.
Luckily, Jan Fröjdman did, and he edited them all into a video titled "A Fictive Flight Above Real Mars," a calming 3D examination of the red planet.
With its meditative music by Neil Cross and slow-paced camera panning, it might remind you of 2001: A Space Odyssey or stunning HD flyover videos like this one. There are no people on Mars and no practical way to actually fly over the planet (yet!), but it's a true-to-life representation of a landscape pockmarked with craters, overrun with mountains and ridges, and cracked and desiccated plains.
The four-minute clip itself took Fröjdman three months to edit together from 3D imagery of Mars, shot with NASA's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. Fröjdman used NASA's library of 50,000 anaglyph images taken by the camera over the last 12 years to edit together the video. As a result, you don't need 3D glasses anymore to appreciate the full detail the images capture.
H/T: Wired
