Mapping Hacks

Map Other Planets #34

Chapter 3, Mapping Your World

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HACK

and Jupiter’s moons. The FTP site ftp://webgis.wr.usgs.gov/mars/usgs/topo/

MOLA_contours_25Mscale/Mars_MOLA_contours_colorimages.zip contains

a great selection of vectors and rasters for making topographical maps of

Mars. Many files give instructions for ArcExplorer, but the open source GIS

products featured in this book are more than apt for the task. Additionally,

you can get lots of nice data from the USGS Map-A-Planet site at http://

pdsmaps.wr.usgs.gov/.

Quantum GIS

[Hack #64], is a great basic viewer for extraterrestrial GIS data.

Figure 3-41 shows an Equirectangular projection map displayed in Quan-

tum GIS, zoomed in to Olympus Mons and Pavonis Mons, with overlaid

topographical shapefiles from the same data set.

Many extraterrestrial maps available on the Web use the visually familiar

technique of hypsographic tinting—features shaded in an attractive, earthly

scheme showing lowest altitudes in marine blue, and mountain peaks in a

burnt-out yellow. This coloring scheme lends Earth maps a pleasing “natu-

ral look”; seeing other planets drawn with hypsographic tints reveals the

attractive illusion for what it is.

Rendering 3-D Imagery of Other Planets

Raster maps in cylindrical projections are also suitable for use with xplanet,the

3-D planet renderer covered in “Map Global Weather Conditions”

[Hack #46].

xplanet was designed for rendering ...