NASA’s Juno spacecraft is on a collision course with destiny (and also, Jupiter), thanks to a Mario Kart-like boost in speed it received as it buzzed past Warth on October 9, 2013. Not one to miss out on the opportunity for a scenic photo op, a camera sensor on board the spacecraft captured a view of the Earth-moon system, and the result is a low-resolution video of what the Third Kind might see before the impending close encounter.

“If Captain Kirk of the USS Enterprise said, ‘Take us home, Scotty,’ this is what the crew would see,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio. “In the movie, you ride aboard Juno as it approaches Earth and then soars off into the blackness of space. No previous view of our world has ever captured the heavenly waltz of Earth and moon.”

The cameras that captured the footage are typically used to track faint stars. As a bonus, Juno’s Waves instrument (to be used for measuring radio and plasma waves in Jupiter’s atmosphere) picked up some amateur radio chatter. The public outreach effort encouraged ham radio users to say hello, and and operators from every continent (including Antarctica) were represented.

After Juno arrives and enters into orbit around Jupiter in 2016, the spacecraft will circle the planet 33 times, from pole to pole, and use its instruments to probe beneath cloud cover obscuring the solar system’s largest planet. Scientists will learn about Jupiter’s origins, internal structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere.

Capturing the images in the video was difficult, as Juno did not have the serene view of Earth astronauts enjoy from shuttles and the ISS. Instead, Juno was whipping past Earth at twice the speed of a normal satellite, as well as slowly rotating at the rate of 2rpm. The star tracker had to capture each frame at precisely the right time, otherwise the footage would be dizzying. The images were sent to Earth where they were assembled into video format, not unlike the .gifs that litter the internet today.

“Everything we humans are and everything we do is represented in that view,” said the star tracker’s designer, John Jørgensen of the Danish Technical University, near Copenhagen.

Here’s the video, with an original accompaniment by Vangelis.