Animation: Mars Express rising above the north pole

The "Mars Webcam" on Mars Express (otherwise known as the Visual Monitoring Camera or VMC) has just restarted sending images to Earth after a bit of a hiatus. Not being a science instrument, VMC gets the lowest downlink priority among all of ESA's spacecraft and instruments, so was crowded out through July by demands from Rosetta for Lutetia data and from conditions being unusually good for the other optical instruments aboard Mars Express. Last week they posted to the VMC blog the first few image sets I've seen for a while, showing Mars in a relatively high phase, but nothing out of the ordinary for VMC. Yesterday, though, I found a really nice set that I just had to animate, taken from a relatively low altitude over the picturesque swirls of Mars' north polar cap, which is brightly lit now by round-the-clock summer sun.

Want to learn for yourself how to process these images? Watch my tutorial video here. Here are a couple of other past VMC posts: Phobos' shadow transit; 64 views of Mars.