A peek at the JunoCam approach movie

We're now just about 12 hours away from Juno's Jupiter orbit insertion. As anticipation ramps up, NASA has released this sneak peek at JunoCam's approach movie, made of views of Jupiter and its largest moons shot during the final approach, up until about five days ago. Callisto is the dimmest, slowest-moving moon, then there are Ganymede, Europa, and finally fastest-moving Io.

They didn't specify when in the approach this portion of the movie was taken -- the full movie was planned to be at least 7 and hopefully 17 days long, but this little segment shows only about 48 hours of it (slightly more than one Io orbital period). I can't discern any features on Jupiter in this Youtube version of the animation -- if anything is visible in the original data, it's lost in the Youtube compression artifacts. But there is one cool, unmistakable feature in the amination -- the winking-out of Io and Europa as they are eclipsed in Jupiter's shadow. Neat!

Stay tuned for more from Juno's arrival at Jupiter later today!