The moon in Minetest

I was at a conference over the weekend, and I also had some spare time at the airport, on the plane and in the hotel, so I entertained myself by finishing off a lunar mod for Minetest (a free Minecraft-like game, which works a lot better than Minecraft on old hardware) that uses real-world data from NASA's LRO spacecraft to generate lunar textures. To make this more Minetest-y, I flatten the moon out into two pancakes, and then I exaggerate the terrain by a factor of five (which is adjustable). And I added some sky background textures from SpaceEngine. (The Enterprise isn't a part of this mod, but is generated with the render.py script for RaspberryJamMod).

Very new moon

Two-day old moon

LunarMap 1.20 released

I've released LunarMap 1.20 Lite/HD for Android.  Both versions got optimizations which could improve scrolling smoothness a fair amount (it's still not perfect).  The free Lite version also got a big change.  Previously, only a few maps were available, and only of the front of the moon.  Also, after 8X zoom it would just blow up the 8X map, pixelating more and more as you zoomed more.  Now, the Lite version has access to all of the same maps as the HD version, but if you exceed 8X zoom, it watermarks the screen with a big ugly "LITE".  But since it has the same maps, you now know exactly what you're missing with the HD version.

If you preferred the way the old Lite version worked, the last such version is available here, at least temporarily.

LunarMap also works great under Bluestacks on a Windows 7 laptop.

LunarMap HD USGS Geologic Map

I've added the 1971 USGS Geologic Map to LunarMap HD for Android (available in Google Play and Amazon Appstore (which will take a couple of days to update)).

Notice in the screenshot how the labels hard-printed on the map get combined with the yellow labels added by LunarMap, without any duplication of labels.

LunarMap 1.11 for Android

I just posted LunarMap HD and Lite 1.11 in the Android Market (or Google Play, as it is now awfully renamed).  Today's revisions

• Add satellite features (e.g., Plato B) [HD only]
• Adds astronaut-named features
• Improve memory handling
• Fix bug with selection of feature types
• Add a little more info about feature types

With this reversion, the HD version contains all official 9099 IAU named features.

I will upload to the Amazon Appstore on Monday if all is well.

LunarMap HD and Lite officially released

I finally got to the 1.00 release.  It's now in the Market:

• Free Lite version
• Paid ($0.99) HD version

The screenshot shows the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's false-color far-side map (HD version).

And here is the latest Lite apk file.

Android moon maps

And talking of the moon, I am working on an Android moon maps app.  I am not so interested in making a planetarium app, as I am holding out for an Android version of SkySafari.

This has now been officially released in the Android Market:

• Free Lite version
• Paid ($0.99) HD version

If you don't have access to Android Market, you can download the Lite version here.  If you want to purchase the HD version after that, email me.

Requires Android 1.5.

I will update this post in the comments as needed with new features.  The beta version expires at the end of the 2011 calendar year.

My 5000x5000 zoomable moon maps

I posted a bunch of large zoomable moon maps with the help of zoom.it, which I discovered while looking for a way to view Spinoza dependency graphs.

The moon, visually

For various reasons, I haven't been doing that much observing for the past half year or so. But I've been out twice this week looking at the moon with my 8" Coulter. I can't really do deep space viewing given the lights that have cropped up in a nearby grassy area, but the moon is all the better for it. I've been observing in and not far from Mare Serenitatis: Posidonius and Cassini were particularly striking, as was Ryma Hyginus together with its central crater. I am finally getting good use of my 5mm ortho eyepiece--it's really nice for the moon, giving a sharp 160X image.

Moon with webcam

While working on an Instructable for how to take pictures through a microscope, I was using a webcam (with lens removed) to take some pictures of the moon, shooting small video sequences and stacking them with Avi Stack.  Conditions were imperfect, but it was fun.

Avi Stack generates photos like these from wobbly video like this:

The moon

Here is a great zoomable image of the moon from NASA.

Lunar eclipse

I stayed up to watch the lunar eclipse.  It was quite nice.  I took the kids out for the grand finale.

I also took a whole bunch of photos.  I'll be editing them a bit more and trying to write some script to align the frames better (and maybe even de-rotating?), but for now, here is the set.  The animation jumpy because I wasn't taking pictures all the time--some of the time I was indoors watching Starship Exeter.  I used a perl script and ImageMagick to animate the photos, using the exif time stamps and speeding up by a factor of 400.  Some of the shadows are odd--I've had trouble with shadows of clouds, branches and internal telescope structures.  I'll eventually try to clean up the photos and remove the bad ones.

Clavius

I was playing with my 5mm ortho eyepiece on my 13" last night, looking at the moon and Jupiter, but the seeing wasn't good enough.  But I did take a picture of Clavius with my Canon G7 through my Hyperion 13mm.  Not as sharp as I'd like.

Back from trip

I've just come back from a conference in Ireland.  I didn't do any stargazing there, but as always it's amazing to see how long the summer days are up north (latitude 53 versus the 31 of my home).  Here's a photo of the moon (left) and Venus (right--to see it you may need to click to blow up the image, or adjust the contrast on your screen) over a foggy golf course in Maynooth (Canon G7 braced on a bridge railing, set to 1600 ISO and 1/10 seconds), at around 9:50 pm local time.

Custom moon map service relocated

I've relocated the custom moon map service to http://pruss.mobi/cgi-bin/moon.pl.  This may only be a temporary fix.

Need hosting for my custom moon map service

It being hot weather, and the air conditioning being in operation, I want to take a long hard look at always-on heat emitters, like our home server. Currently, besides doing some file serving that we can do, and some work-related stuff that I can move to my office server, it serves up custom moon maps--you choose the features you want, and it makes the map. Bandwidth requirements are low as I only have one user about every second day. My current server is a 2ghz P4 with 512mb RAM, so nothing fancy is called for. Just apache+modperl (with Perlmagick). If anybody is interested in volunteering some server CPU time and bandwidth, email me.

Moon and Saturn

Last night, I had a nice time looking at the Moon and Saturn.  The shadow of the ring seemed rather more offset from the ring then I remembered it--must be due to the way things are tilted.  The Moon was lovely, both in my 8" Coulter, and in the 6" F/5 I'm building (where it was super-sharp at 125X, even though I was hand-holding).  I was particularly struck by a crater with a lovely double peak near the terminator.  The deep parts of the crater were dark, and there were two gleaming white peaks there.  Maybe it was Burg?  I didn't check with a map at the time.  Burg looks slightly too far from the terminator in the Virtual Moon Atlas, though.  But maybe.