The Atlas of Moons is National Geographic’s interactive guide to every single moon in the solar system (except for a few moons of dwarf planets and asteroids that we know next to nothing about). The big ones get interactive globes and additional description (as do Mars’s moons Phobos and Deimos, because we have imagery for them). Note that this is an extremely resource-intensive page that will use gigabytes of RAM if you let it.
Last week Eleanor Lutz, who gave us an old-style map of Mars in 2016 and a Goddesses of Venus map in 2017, announced her latest project: “Over the past year and a half I’ve been working on a collection of ten maps on planets, moons, and outer space. To name a few, I’ve made an animated map of the seasons on Earth, a map of Mars geology, and a map of everything in the solar system bigger than 10km.” In the coming weeks she’ll be going through each of those maps and explaining the design and source data for each. First up this week: her map of the solar system showing the orbits of every object larger than 10 km in diameter, from Mercury to the Kuiper Belt, and thousands of asteroids in between. [Universe Today]
Previously: ‘Here There Be Robots’: Eleanor Lutz’s Map of Mars; Eleanor Lutz’s Goddesses of Venus.
The Moon and Mars were relatively early additions to Google Earth; that application may have been migrated to the web, but the planets and moons keep coming. Yesterday Google announced the addition of a dozen other worlds in our solar system; the space layer of Google Maps now includes planets Mercury, Venus and Mars; dwarf planets Ceres and Pluto;1 Jupiter’s moons Io, Europa and Ganymede; and Saturn’s moons Dione, Enceladus, Iapetus, Mimas, Rhea and Titan. Large moons Callisto and Triton aren’t included, and Iapetus is projected onto a sphere rather than appearing as the bizarre space walnut it is.
The Planetary Society’s Emily Lakdawalla noticed a thing, though:
Anybody know who I should talk to at @Google to let them know that several of the icy moon maps have names & image offset by 180 degrees?
— Lady Lakdawalla of Baltis Vallis (@elakdawalla) October 16, 2017
Emily reports that this bug affects several moons of Jupiter and Saturn; Google is apparently already on it and may have fixed it by the time you read this.
If you wanted to make your own globe of Pluto based on New Horizons imagery, now’s your chance: Sarah Morrison has created globe gores based on NASA’s photomosaic global map of Pluto.
(Globe gores for other planets and moons are available for download from the USGS’s Astrogeology Science Center.)
Previously: Globes of the Solar System.
Esri’s Solar System Atlas collects maps of all the planets, dwarf planets, moons, asteroids and comets that have been visited by spacecraft in one location. (At least the ones with solid surfaces.) Now keep in mind that maps of other objects in the solar system are generally spacecraft imagery stitched together into a mosaic and displayed on a map projection, and this is mostly what is presented here (plus some colourized topographic maps and a few geologic maps). Not many of the maps are labelled, which is a shame: bare imagery isn’t terribly useful. Also, the map tiles load slowly, and zooming out doesn’t always refresh them. But as a concept, I’m all for this. More from Esri’s Matt Artz. [via]
On Shapeways, a site where users can upload and sell 3D-printed items, George Ioannidis is selling globes of the planets and moons of our solar system. There are individual globes, globes that take into account moons’ irregular topography (e.g. Phobos and Diemos, Iapetus), all in different sizes (none of which are very big: 50 to 200 mm), and collections where each planet and moon is to scale (as seen above, this can be somewhat unwieldy, but it’s neat for Jupiter’s Galilean moons, for example). I’m unreasonably enthusiastic about this sort of thing. [via]
Previously: Globes of the Solar System.
