the Mercury texture of Celestia is in quite a neglected state and
surely far from being close to reality.
Since I happen to have the biggest available (11k) 'limit of
knowledge'-masked Mercury texture from the Mariner 10 mission, I
started some work on it.
-- size rescaling to 8k
-- careful 'healing' of the /many/ visible artifacts from composing the
texture as a 'mosaic'
-- filling the 'empty' half essentially with a flipped image of the
available half. Of course, the 'limit of knowledge' mask may always
be overlayed by toggling the '+' key (CVS-version)
-- applying the usual general enhancement tricks
-- since Mercury colors are presumably /very/ similar to those of our Moon, I
computer-mapped my reference Apollo-Moon photo to the Mercury
grayscale image.
Altogether, the 8k texture now looks pretty 'even' and certainly
somewhat better than the Moon texture from the Clementine mission...
No 'bad' areas anywhere.
So here are two shots from the 8k texture, to give you a flavor of
what may be done. There is no bump-map applied, only a little bit of
spec lighting
Bye Fridger
