Fly Around Ceres In This Dramatic New NASA Video

NASA has released a dramatic new video of the dwarf planet Ceres (above).

The black-and-white animation lets viewers fly around the mysterious orb from an altitude of 8,400 miles, compressing the nine-hour Cererian day into 75 seconds. It was assembled from 80 images taken by the space agency's Dawn spacecraft.

"We used a three-dimensional terrain model that we had produced based on the images acquired so far," Ralf Jaumann, a Dawn team member with the German Aerospace Center in Berlin, said in a written statement. "They will become increasingly detailed as the mission progresses--with each additional orbit bringing us closer to the surface."

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Diagram showing path taken by Dawn spacecraft.

Just don't believe everything you see in the video, which was posted to YouTube on June 8, 2015: NASA doubled the vertical dimension and added a star field in the background.

Dawn was launched in 2007. It spent 14 months studying the rocky protoplanet Vesta before entering orbit around Ceres on March 6, 2015.