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The Gas Behemoth: Behold the overwhelming beauty and enormity of Jupiter in new probe footage

It’s hard to grasp the sheer immensity of a planet like Jupiter. The avaliable photos and footage of the gas behemoth are enough to boggle the mind, but what we’ve seen is but a glimpse of it’s beauty and enormity. Now, Gerald Eichstaedt and Seán Doran have given us much bigger picture.

Jupiter

The Gas Behemoth: Behold the overwhelming beauty and enormity of Jupiter in this new footage from the Juno probe.

The footage we’ve been treated to below is actually a compilation of images taken by the Juno probe.

As Wired point out, Juno, launched in 2011, follows a orbit around Jupiter to gather information about its atmosphere and structure.

Once every 53 days, Juno dips to a relatively low altitude of just 2,600 miles and makes a pass from north to south, recording six megabytes of data and imagery during the two-hour flight.

When NASA released the images from Juno’s latest transit earlier this month, Eichstaedt, a German mathematician, got to work. He spent 60 hours combining 36 images into video with software he wrote.

“They are overwhelmingly beautiful,” Eichstaedt says of the photos. “Technically, these images from JunoCam are challenging, and I like to approach technical limits.”

When Eichstaedt uploaded his video to unmannedspaceflight.com, an online forum for space enthusiasts, Doran, an animator and filmmaker in London, loved the video so much he ended up spending 12 hours smoothing and enhancing each of the 2,400 frames in the video before adding the haunting soundtrack.

Behold the immense beauty and enormity of the biggest of the Gas Giants below.

[this article originally on Wired]