I don’t care how busy you are, take 90 seconds and be blown away:

This video comes to us from Lucas Green, a video artist who is working on a project that requires stunning space visuals. Rather than create them from scratch, Green mined the publicly available imagery to be found on NASA’s many websites. In addition to being easy to come by and free of charge, these images have the added benefit of being, well, real.

To turn the images into real planets, moons, and craters, Green projected them onto 3D models. He also used some subtle animation techniques to really make the objects come alive in the video. My favorite examples are the swirling hexagon at Saturn’s north pole, the lightning in the storm clouds of Jupiter, and the icy geysers of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

Lucas Green documents more of the process on his blog, and I highly recommend checking it out. In the meantime, I’m hoping that we’ll see more of what Green has been up to!