NASA's New Horizons team this week released the first official video of Pluto.

The footage is not exactly HD; it kind of looks like someone messed up that old VHS tape of you slowly moving a styrofoam ball past a camcorder for a school project. But hello, this is Pluto.

The video was shot at just under two frames per second (with a 256-by-256-pixel camera), and looks like a technicolor experiment. That's intentional, as NASA used New Horizons's LEISA infrared imaging spectrometer to capture its images of Pluto's surface—for more scientific reasons than simply getting a pretty movie, that is.

"It is an extremely clever instrument; it takes 2-D images just like a normal camera, but it takes them through a linearly-varying filter. One side of the camera can only see light of one specific wavelength of infrared light (light that has longer wavelengths than can be seen by our eyes), and each row of pixels can see a subtly different wavelength," reads NASA's description.

"The effect is much like looking through a stained glass window designed for infrared eyes. By scanning this image sensor with its linear filter across a scene and quickly recording many images during the scan (like a movie), LEISA builds up a two-dimensional map of the scene in front of the camera with a measurement of the infrared spectrum (the brightness versus wavelength) at every location in the image. It makes this complex measurement with exactly zero moving parts — highly reliable for deep-space operations."

Using this technique, the New Horizons team was able to confirm the existence of water ice on the planet, and the very same technique helped the team discern that ammonia ice exists on Pluto's largest moon, Charon.

While that's exciting and all, NASA researchers also seem similarly thrilled that the movie—whose colors have been remapped, since you obviously wouldn't be able to see the infrared light that New Horizons's LEISA can see—is the first official film of Pluto. And, no, stitching together a series of static images of Pluto to make a movie doesn't count.

"Just take a moment and imagine you were on board our little robotic emissary to the farthest worlds ever explored, watching Pluto come into view through a colorful window on the side of the spacecraft. Sure, it might not be in HD, but I promise that you've never seen anything like this before," reads NASA's blog.

According to NASA, the New Horizons team is currently analyzing this and other movies to see what else it can learn about the surface of both Pluto and Charon.