Instead of working with NASA to find landing spots on Mars for future SpaceX missions to touch down, Elon Musk might want to get in touch with Finnish filmmaker Jan Fröjdman.
After accessing the more than 50,000 high-resolution images of Martian terrain that the HiRISE camera has snapped from orbit over the past decade, Fröjdman pieced together a coherent video of what flying over the Red Planet would look like by stitching selected images together.
Fröjdman used more than 33,000 reference points to help him make sure all the topographical features were rendered correctly, a time-consuming process that took three months to finish.
Since the images the HiRISE captures are in grayscale, Fröjdman added moderate amounts of color into the clips himself, using yellow for light, blue for dark and white-blue for polar areas.
So why’d he do it?
“I would love to see images taken by a landscape photographer on Mars, especially from the polar regions,” Fröjdman says. “But I’m afraid I won’t see [those] kind of images during my lifetime. This film is not scientific. As a space enthusiast I have just tried to visualize the planet my way.”
Meet your guide
More Like This
This article appeared in an InsideHook newsletter. Sign up for free to get more on travel, wellness, style, drinking, and culture.
