Preliminary Hapke Moon Textures | Level 11

[Post much?]

**EDIT 2**: Add-on graciously hosted by Orbit-Hangar! [ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=6858"]Grab your copy today![/ame]

Hi,

I come out of my cave to present a possible alternative to the current moon textures of the latest revision.

So, a few days ago, after being frustrated with a fruitless search for a non-shaded mosaic of the Moon, I stumbled upon an amazing find - the WMS server had a full-res copy (109,164 x 54,582) of a 643nm reflectance map! This opportunity was way too good to pass up, so I took to the tedious task of engineering WMS web queries to scrape the whole map (72 tiles worth) from the web server, which I assembled into eight 27,291 x 27,291 tiles for easier processing.

I then downloaded this product and selected the 643nm, 566nm, and 415 color bands to more closely represent true color. Since the data only goes to ±60°, I had to cheat and use GIMP's sample colorize feature to color the remaining ±30° data with a palette derived from the Hapke maps. Thus, the map has a noticeable discontinuity where the real data and image trickery meet, which I've tried to reduce to the best of my abilities.

The Hapke data was upsampled and used as a coloring layer in Photoshop a la Landsat pan-sharpening, where the full-res reflectance acts as the luminosity layer. After equalizing the brightness between images, the finished tiles were resized through GIMP/ImageMagick and sent through plsplit64. Texture generation was relatively uneventful, except for the occasional "pltex ERROR; could not create temporary bitmap" that occurred at random places in the sequence. I couldn't wait to see how the final result would look in Orbiter - even level 9 was already looking amazing, but I had to stop and finish the map before I got too lost in the visuals .

Anyway, enjoy the images in the meantime!

Here the flaws of the current elevation map are put into sharp relief - any word on using the SLDEM2015 data, martins?

---------- Post added 12-06-15 at 11:44 AM ---------- Previous post was 12-05-15 at 04:41 PM ----------

I posted [ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=6852"]levels 1 through 8[/ame] on Orbithangar as a preview.

 

[Post much?]

The addon is now released!
[ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=6858"]Grab it here![/ame]

 

[Col_Klonk]

Any chance of splitting the files into smaller chunks ( 250MB ?) ?
Something similar to the Mars hires textures!

:tiphat:

 

[Abloheet]

Does this addon have any distribution structure like the official distro, i.e., a global low package of levels 1-9, then high res tiles or sets for 9-11?
Or is the 1-11 packaged in one big zip?

 

[Post much?]

Does this addon have any distribution structure like the official distro, i.e., a global low package of levels 1-9, then high res tiles or sets for 9-11?
Or is the 1-11 packaged in one big zip?

Sorry for not clarifying in the description before (JUST updated it once again :blush, but this includes all surface resolution folders (1 through 11). I would like to offer this add-on like the first option in the near future, once I figure out a way to present it (e.g. levels 9-11 in 8 parts or 32 parts?), and if OH is okay offering this option alongside my single-zip download. I'll have to see when things settle down, but in the meantime, I'll prepare the 8-tile (600MB per zip) version.