Post by shadowdragon on May 21, 2020 2:28:08 GMT
While the Moon already has it's own layer set provided by Google, at the time it was released on July 20, 2009, it was widely praised, but as time passed, it became clear this was a last minute gift Google made to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. Since 2009, the Moon globe has been completely neglected with even some link rot making the Kaguya videos simply lag the program and not show anything.
This set includes better images of some areas as well as updated placenames. Many landing sites have since been located by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and thus have updated locations as well as a detailed closeup image of said landing/crash site. Rovers like Lunokhod and Yutu now have improved route maps with better imagery. Any non-manned craft that took images from the Lunar surface have some photos included.
Also included are 19 overlays displaying physical and mineralogical properties of the moon, a few of which are very large and one of which is a much higher resolution color terrain image than the default one provided.
This layer includes:
11 Super resolution overlays including topography and mineralogical abundances
4 High Medium resolution overlays including gravity and geoid differences
Much higher resolution topographic overlay of the moon (Left) than the default one provided (Right). It is also better aligned with the vanilla texture than the default topographic map.
Improved resolution imagery provided by NASA and ASU. The NASA images are geolocated images from NASA Photojournal and the ASU images are the Featured Satellite Images downloaded and geolocated. Some of the NASA photojournal images have LROC NAC images included which have the resolution of cities on Earth.
On top of this, updated and expanded placenames are included that have been named by the IAU. The default Place Names feature only has an outdated tip of the iceberg when it comes to IAU approved placenames on the moon. The place names provided by Google have not been updated in 11 years and secondary lettered crater names are left out. This set fixes that (be careful, there are thousands of places names in this so it may be slow!)
Improved resolution for select areas and the full set of IAU approved lunar place names.
Finally, since the launch of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, dozens of artifical objects have had their locations discovered and this overlay provides the correct locations for said located objects. Included are new landing/crash sites since 2009 and detailed to-scale imagery is provided for landing/crash sites. As a bonus, all unmanned craft that took pictures have photos included so you can see the scenery these probes saw. Unfortunately there is no way as far as I know to import 3D models to replace the ones Google incorrectly placed.
Super Detailed imagery of the Chang'e 4 landing site and the Yutu-2 Rover Traverse Route. As can be seen, some panoramas have been "map-projected" from overhead to produce centimeter resolution of parts of this area.
I hope you all like this improvement and update to the moon globe on Google Earth. This is one body of several dozen that will be in my Grand Tour Overlay.
Moon.kmz (1.26 MB)
Further thoughts: Google could have done a far better job even back in 2009. The resources were already around. The vanilla map is a poorly processed "jpegged" version of a 50K Clementine imagery map that results in a resolution of 200 meters per pixel degraded to 300 meters per pixel. And this map excludes images from Clementine's HiRes camera which could push it to up to 184K resolution of 50 meters per pixel practically rendering the Lunar Orbiter useless. Also of note is the Apollo missions took detailed images with the metric camera with resolution up to only 10 meters per pixel of 20 percent of the lunar surface. All this data had been out for at least several years prior to Google making the map globe.
Further thoughts 2: Next year I will get a new computer since my current one is 4 years old. After that, I may further improve this and make the ASU overlay sections higher resolution (I was unable to load in the higher resolution versions since it lagged my computer a lot)
This set includes better images of some areas as well as updated placenames. Many landing sites have since been located by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and thus have updated locations as well as a detailed closeup image of said landing/crash site. Rovers like Lunokhod and Yutu now have improved route maps with better imagery. Any non-manned craft that took images from the Lunar surface have some photos included.
Also included are 19 overlays displaying physical and mineralogical properties of the moon, a few of which are very large and one of which is a much higher resolution color terrain image than the default one provided.
This layer includes:
11 Super resolution overlays including topography and mineralogical abundances
4 High Medium resolution overlays including gravity and geoid differences
4 Low Resolution overlays including element abundances
Much higher resolution topographic overlay of the moon (Left) than the default one provided (Right). It is also better aligned with the vanilla texture than the default topographic map.
Improved resolution imagery provided by NASA and ASU. The NASA images are geolocated images from NASA Photojournal and the ASU images are the Featured Satellite Images downloaded and geolocated. Some of the NASA photojournal images have LROC NAC images included which have the resolution of cities on Earth.
On top of this, updated and expanded placenames are included that have been named by the IAU. The default Place Names feature only has an outdated tip of the iceberg when it comes to IAU approved placenames on the moon. The place names provided by Google have not been updated in 11 years and secondary lettered crater names are left out. This set fixes that (be careful, there are thousands of places names in this so it may be slow!)
Improved resolution for select areas and the full set of IAU approved lunar place names.
Finally, since the launch of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, dozens of artifical objects have had their locations discovered and this overlay provides the correct locations for said located objects. Included are new landing/crash sites since 2009 and detailed to-scale imagery is provided for landing/crash sites. As a bonus, all unmanned craft that took pictures have photos included so you can see the scenery these probes saw. Unfortunately there is no way as far as I know to import 3D models to replace the ones Google incorrectly placed.
Super Detailed imagery of the Chang'e 4 landing site and the Yutu-2 Rover Traverse Route. As can be seen, some panoramas have been "map-projected" from overhead to produce centimeter resolution of parts of this area.
I hope you all like this improvement and update to the moon globe on Google Earth. This is one body of several dozen that will be in my Grand Tour Overlay.
Moon.kmz (1.26 MB)
Further thoughts: Google could have done a far better job even back in 2009. The resources were already around. The vanilla map is a poorly processed "jpegged" version of a 50K Clementine imagery map that results in a resolution of 200 meters per pixel degraded to 300 meters per pixel. And this map excludes images from Clementine's HiRes camera which could push it to up to 184K resolution of 50 meters per pixel practically rendering the Lunar Orbiter useless. Also of note is the Apollo missions took detailed images with the metric camera with resolution up to only 10 meters per pixel of 20 percent of the lunar surface. All this data had been out for at least several years prior to Google making the map globe.
Further thoughts 2: Next year I will get a new computer since my current one is 4 years old. After that, I may further improve this and make the ASU overlay sections higher resolution (I was unable to load in the higher resolution versions since it lagged my computer a lot)
