Tag: planets

Digital Museum of Planetary Mapping

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Camille Flammarion, “Mappemonde géographique de la planète Mars,” Terres du Ciel, 1884.

The Digital Museum of Planetary Mapping is an online collection of maps of the planets and moons of our solar system. There are more than two thousand maps in the catalogue, some dating as far back as the 17th century, but the bulk of them, understandably, are much more recent; also understandably, Mars and the Moon are the subject of most of the maps (40 and 46 percent, respectively).

The site is more like a blog than a library catalogue: it’s powered by WordPress and the individual listings are blog posts, but that’s perfectly legitimate, albeit less elegant. (But then who am I to judge?)

The project was presented at the European Planetary Science Congress in Berlin last month: for news coverage, see Phys.org and Space.com; the press release is here. [WMS/WMS]

Planetary Maps for Children

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Planetary Maps for Children is a collection of pictorial maps of several moons and planets of the Solar System (so far: Venus, Mars, the Moon, Io, Europa, Titan, and Pluto and Charon), aimed at younger map readers. The maps are vibrant and colourful, full of sight gags and “fabulous make-believe creatures” and other sight gags. They’re available in digital, poster and virtual globe formats and available in several languages; the whole thing is a project of the ICA’s Commission on Planetary Cartography. [via]

Moons and Planets added to Google Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Google Maps (screenshot)

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:

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.

3D Printed Planetary Globes

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

3d-printed-planets

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.

Ganymede and Mercury

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Geologic map of Ganymede

The USGS has published a geologic map of Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon and the largest moon in the Solar System, based on imagery from the Voyager 1, Voyager 2 and Galileo probes. Via Centauri Dreams, Sky and Telescope.

Meanwhile, Sky and Telescope has produced a Mercury globe based on MESSENGER imagery. They already produce both visual and topographic globes of the Moon and Mars, as well as a globe of Venus coloured for elevation. (I’m crossing my fingers for globes of the outer moons, myself.)

I’m big on maps and globes of the rest of the Solar System. Recent entries: Maps of Mercury; Atlas of Vesta; A Topographic Map of Titan.