Jonathan Langton took the Spitzer 8-micron time-series for HD 80606b and transformed it into a movie of an actual extrasolar planet. The money-minded studio execs, having never seen the the successful prequel, decided that the full 30-hour version might not do well in theaters, so the original “Director’s Cut” had to be edited. The final result? Thirty hours of one-pixel, gray-scale footage have been compressed into a 10-second movie showing the excitement surrounding perihelion at a rate of 3 hours per second.

Be sure to watch for the secondary eclipse!