
Giordano Bruno Crater, 22km across. Recently the LROC team produced a very high resolution image and published a 778meg TIFF file. I took the 1 meg thumbnail of that file and combined it with the elevation data cut from LDEM_128.jp2 produced by the LOLA science team. Here are a couple of snapshots of the result with the camera just off the floor of the crater.

A little to the left of the previous image, both looking North.

Snapshot of 11-million-face .ply file generated from LDEM_85S_20M.jp2 produced by the LOLA science team. Click for full size. Colorized by height and by lighting, which brings out the mountains and high plateau. Shackleton Crater at center-right. Where would you land?

Peary Crater with the North Pole of the Moon in the distance. At the left the sharp-edged crater is Hermite A, a virtual twin of Shackleton Crater at the South Pole. The color is lighter with height. Most of the deeper craters in this view are candidates for ice mining. From LDEM_85N, produced by the LOLA science team, imaged in Mathematica and visualized in Meshlab.

Boussingault Crater in the lower right quadrant of the Moon. The crater-in-a-crater aspect holds out hope the floor will be composed of material from the interior. See http://www.lpod.org/?m=20060410
Imaged from ldem_64 produced by the LOLA science team. 64 pixels per degree, 10 x 20 degree section colored and lit in Meshlab.

Shackleton Crater with the sun 30 degrees above the horizon, illuminating the floor of the crater. From LDEM_875S_10M.JP2 produced by the LOLA science team; reduced to 100 meters per pixel.


10 km square view of floor of Shackleton Crater at 10 meter resolution. Spires are sensor artifacts when a mirror-like surface overwhelms the sensor. Glare ice? Sunlike illumination is at 20 degrees elevation.

6km square image of Shackleton Crater floor at 5 meter resolution. Sunlike illumination at 15 degrees above horizon. Opposite field of view from above. I still like the top of the mound as a landing site and base.

Camera down in the crater.

Meshlab view of Hagen J (47km) rear center. Location on the far side of the Moon, Latitude 47.5-50S and Longitude 135-140. About a quarter of the rim of Hagen is visible to the right. Image derived from LDEM_512_90S_45S_090_180.jp2 produced by the LOLA science team. 512 pixels per degree makes each pixel about 60 meters. There are stripes of lower-res areas that fill gaps in the data. The bumps in the seams between strips also appear as a scintillation in the texture.

A close-up of Hagen J produced in Blender, a 3D animation program. Looking South, the illumination is from the East. Click images for full size.

Firefly Planisphere Deluxe by Storm Dunlop and Wil Tirion at 15″ in diameter had print too small to read without magnification. Here is a 36″ version. The star chart is to sixth magnitude from the back of the original.
PK Hoover – Sky and Telescope, 1962 – adsabs.harvard.edu
Title: A Giant Planisphere in Color. Authors: Hoover, Paul K. Publication: Sky and
Telescope, volume 23, page 203. Publication Date: 04/1962. Origin: S&T
Hoover’s Planisphere was 24″ but he made it from scratch.