U.S.G.S. Planetary GIS Web Server - PIGWAD

Description: The Lunar Airbrushed Shadedrelief available below has been warped using a 6th order polynomial to the ULCN2005 control network. They are stored in a GIS-ready, 8bit GeoTiff with an embedded Lunar definition of 1737400.0 m radius in a geographic coordinate system at 0.015625 degrees/pixel (64 p/d or ~474 m/p). The longitudes are in a -180 to 180 system to keep the near-side centered. Polar files are also available in a Polar Stereographic projection (961 m/p).

History of the product. The shaded relief data were originally published as a series of 1:5 million shaded relief maps. This series included three U.S. Geological Survey maps: I–1218–B, Shaded Relief Map of the Lunar Far Side, 1980; I–1326–A, Shaded Relief Map of the Lunar Polar Regions, 1981; and I–2276, Sheet 2 of 2, Shaded Relief Map of the Lunar Near Side, 1992. These data were digitized and mosaicked into a single digital file. An area of approximately 500,000 km2 near the south pole was not visible in any pre-Clementine images and is blank on the published map. The digitized relief base was revised based on the Clementine mosaic and recent Earth-based radar imagery to show features in this area. Errors that were present in the original interpretations of lunar morphology have not been corrected in the digital version of the warped shaded relief map base. These original errors were caused by scanty data, ambiguities introduced by highly oblique solar incidence angles, and distortions created in generating orthophotographs from oblique images.

The unwarped product was also released in 2002 as a series of map sheets called the Geologic Investigations Series I-2769