I went with the title of this video, A Fictive Flight Above Real Mars, because I couldn’t think of a pithy subject line. A fellow named Jan Fröjdman says he spent six months selecting anaglyphic 3D image pairs from the HIRISE camera aboard MRO (the “real Mars” part), and then compiled them into a moving flyover of several areas on Mars (“fictive”). And this is what’s tricky to describe: This is not your usual flyover rendered from elevation data with an overlay of image data for color, this is 2D projection of real stereoscopic pairs, selected to make motion sequences.

And motion is what makes it so striking. As you move the parallax changes, the edges of ridges move against their canyon backdrops, you fly over a mesa to see what’s on the other side, and canyon after canyon snakes by as if you’re looking down from an airliner at the American Southwest.

It’s beautiful. Fröjdman advises viewing it in 1080 if you can, and I concur–the source images are very high-res and individually magnificent, you need to high-res to do it justice.

Check it out.