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.

New maps of Ceres were released today at the European Planetary Science Conference in Nantes, France. One is a colour-coded topopgraphical map that resembles a map we saw earlier but adds newly approved names for topographical features. Another, the false-colour map seen above, combines imagery through infrared, red and blue filters and highlights compositional differences on Ceres’ surface (different materials reflect light at different frequencies).

As I predicted, a new global map of Pluto has been released that incorporates the imagery that has been downlinked so far from the New Horizons flyby: with gridlines, without gridlines. If nothing else, the equatorial projection demonstrates how much of Pluto’s surface was not seen during the very brief encounter. From what I understand, imagery downlinks will resume in September and carry on for another year, so this map will almost certainly see many more updates.

Meanwhile, Ceres also has some new maps.

Elevation data for these colour-coded topographical maps “was constructed from analyzing images from Dawn’s framing camera taken from varying sun and viewing angles”; these data were then applied to image mosaics and mapped to cylindrical and orthographic projections. The cylindrical map also includes crater names recently approved by the IAU.

Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA (Ceres); NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (Pluto).

• Dawn’s first colour map of Ceres: map-projected false-colour images of the dwarf planet taken as the spacecraft approached, assembled from images taken through blue, green and infrared filters. (Previously: At Ceres.)
• An elevation map of the Ares Vallis region of Mars (above) from the DLR, the German space agency (via io9).
• A map of known exoplanets in the Milky Way; most of them were found during the Kepler mission, which pointed at a a particular region of space.