Real footage of Jupiter and Saturn gives ‘mind-blowing’ view of planets

NASA’S space probes have captured some incredible footage of Jupiter, Saturn and their moons over the years.

A time lapse of Jupiter’s moons Europa and Io has become particularly popular on Reddit as the small orbs can be seen in color circling their planet.

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The time lapse is so good, a lot of people have questioned whether it’s even real.

Another amazing time lapse shows Saturn with its moon Titan.

Nasa engineer Kevin M. Gill tweeted both time lapse videos.

He wrote: “People seemed to like the Europa/Io/Titan gifs, so as an experiment I went and made a short video of them. The Voyage of the Moons.”

The tweet has almost 20,000 likes.

Gill technically used some artistic licence when putting the time lapses together but, on the whole, this is what you’d see if you were looking at the moons up close.

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Gill explained: “The motion isn’t wholly accurate as I made it to look prettier than it was correct.

“But it’s meant to portray the motion visible from a spacecraft that’s moving at a velocity faster than the moons are orbiting.

“So, from a stationary perspective, Io would move faster than Europa.”

Gill used images taken by the Cassini space probe on a flyby of Jupiter and Saturn.

Cassini took the Jupiter images way back in 2001.

It ended its mission for Nasa at Saturn in 2017.

The probe dove into the planet’s atmosphere and all contact was lost.

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In other news, this week marks the anniversary of the first chimpanzee in space.

Nasa has revealed stunning footage of a solar flare in action.

And, the US space agency is planning for a ‘golden asteroid’ probing mission to launch this summer.

This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk