Utilitarian maps are a mouse click away. MapQuest, for example, provides useful roadmaps and directions. Other maps are designed for exploring: Google Earth is an easy install which puts the whole planet on your screen, "as seen on TV." Zoom in to find your favorite observing site or search for another, darker location. Select the Google Earth Community, and see what others have to say. Fly to your favorite vacation resort or just sight-see from home. Check out the Grand Canyon in life-like relief. Google Earth coverage is world-wide and the resolution is amazing.

Online mapping is not limited to this planet: Google Moon displays the Apollo landing sites on a zoomable, clickable lunar surface. Google promises to have their local search capability fully extended to the Moon by the 100th anniversary of the first lunar landing. In the meantime, be sure to zoom all the way in to see what the moon’s really made of.

NASA’s World Wind starts like Google Earth: you can fly around our planet and examine its surface in amazing 3-D relief with time of day shading and atmospheric scattering to add realism. Next, choose another planet or moon from the File pull-down menu. Using an animated Mac-like Dock taskbar, select the sensor or mission data to display. Start with Mars: the full-planet splash screen shows the location of all Mars landers and rovers. Pan around and zoom into the largest canyon in the solar system, Valles Marineris. Compare this fly-through with the Grand Canyon. Very cool. 

NASA has long made mission imagery freely available, first by ftp, then gopher, and now, the Web via various JPL sites. But hard-core planetary cartographers go straight to the USGS’s  Astrogeology Research Program web site. There you’ll find a web-based user interface for poring over various maps of Venus, Mars, our Moon, as well as Jupiter’s moons.

Flat maps are fine, but planets are round, at least according to current IAU regulations Stitched and mosaicked raw images can be transformed mathematically to a cylindrical projection, then wrapped on a sphere, rotated and studied at leisure. DIY planetary cartography can be accomplished with USGS basemaps (or those from any number of other sites) and a rendering program such as POV-Ray. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are an indispensable tool for government agencies, land-use and any sort of environmental or spatial data. Their use is not limited to this planet, however, and much more information can be found in Mapping Hacks by S. Erle, R. Gibson and J. Walsh, part of the O’Reilly Hacks series.

World Wind, USGS astro cartography or POV-Ray are as close to personal planetary exploration as any of us will likely get. This is your chance be the first human to fly through some unnamed valley or enjoy the breathtaking, air-free view from an isolated volcano’s summit. Google Earth plus light pollution maps? How about a Mars mashup? There’s plenty of planetary cartography already for your laptop, and even better, with these maps there’s no struggling to get them folded back up.

Moondark is written by Doug Miller, published at the Moondark web site, and printed in the Delmarva Star Gazers' Star Gazer News. This document was last revised on 22 April 2007. Text and images copyright © 2007 by Douglas C. Miller, All Rights Reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without prior permission.