Celestia Forums

Hello:

I have noticed that all of the moon bump maps out there, at any resolution, are not based on real topographic data, but are based on original colored/shaded images of the moon, using various edge filtering techniques. Honestly, my opinion after using these bump maps is that I'm better off without them.

Having seen the tremendous difference that a dynamic bump map makes for Mars, I am excited about seeing the same results for Luna. However, I have searched the web in vain -- none of the bump maps I can find are real.

Does anyone have any pointers to real topographic bump maps for the moon? I would love to find something suitable as a basis for an 8k bump map. Also, this would need to be used in conjunction with a main texture that was not already shaded with an eastern light source, as the "canned" shadows in the main texture would conflict with the dynamically-computed shadows from the bump map. Does anyone have an pointers to such images?

Thanks for any help,

Tim Crews

Tim,

The best bump maps of the whole moon seem to be those created by James Hastings-Crew. They're available at http://gw.marketingden.com/planets/moon.html

So far my attempts to locate publicly available digital elevation models of the whole moon haven't been successful.

The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Center for Earth and Planetary Studies sponsors a research project to produce planetary DEMs from stereo imagery.

http://www.nasm.si.edu/ceps/research/cook/topo.html

"Topographic Mapping of the Moon. The aim here has been to produce Digital Elevation Model (DEM) mosaic of the whole lunar surface from approximately a third of a million Clementine stereo pair images and to fit the digital terrain models generated to Clementine laser altimeter points. Use was made of automated digital stereo matching software from University College London that is capable of finding locations in the right image for corresponding pixels in the left image. Although there remain several gaps in our final DEM due to lack of stereo coverage, a planet-wide 1 km/pixel DEM of the Moon has been produced and is being examined for previously unknown basins and impact craters. These included sections of the lunar polar regions not previously mapped before."

"Complete topographic processing (at the 1km/pixel DEM scale) of the Moon using Clementine UVVIS stereo images was completed in April 2000. The global DEM will be made available later this year."

Ref: Cook, A.C., Robinson, M.S., and Watters, T.R., Planet-wide lunar digital elevation model, 31st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, Houston, Texas, CDROM abstract #1978, 2000.

This Lunar DEM does not appear to be available on-line yet, however. (At least, I couldn't find it.) Hopefully it will be eventually.

- Hank

A proper colour map of the Moon, free of topographical shading, would also be nice. Are there any around?

Cheers,
Paul

The best one available seems to be the one produced by the USGS from Clementine pictures. Unfortunately, it shows distinct crater rim shadows within about 30 degrees of the poles

http://wwwflag.wr.usgs.gov/USGSFlag/Space/%20clementine/clementine.html