Let This Spectacular Video Take You On A Virtual Flight Over Mars

Although Donald Trump has signed a bill authorizing money to fund future exploration of Mars, tourism to the Red Planet is still a long way away.

Still, a person can dream, and one Finnish filmmaker is making that dream look like reality.

Jan Fröjdman spent three years turning photos taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter into a four and a half minute travelogue of the planet’s surface.

Take a look with the full screen for best effect:

Fröjdman said the anaglyph images of Mars taken by the HiRISE camera holds information about the topography of Mars surface.

Over a three-month period, he slowly and meticulously turned that data and the photos into the video above.

“There is a feeling that you are flying above Mars looking down watching interesting locations on the planet. And there are really great places on Mars!” he said on the video page. “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.”

As cool as it looks, the colors may not be true to Mars. Because the original images were taken in grayscale, Fröjdman added colors he thought were appropriate.

For instance, the light regions are yellowish and the dark regions are bluish, while the polar regions have a white-blue tone.

And while it may not be 100 percent accurate, it might actually be a better view than any actual visitors to Mars will see.

Wired points out that Mars is so dusty that it if you were actually there, it would probably be impossible to see any of the deep valleys or soaring mesas in Fröjdman’s video.