Hi Bernd,

The files are those with a .qwe extension, which is very Guide-specific
and not editable with anything. I have a rather clumsy program which reads
in a source .BMP or .GIF file and converts it to the QWE format. The result
is perfect for Guide's use, but not anything anyone else would want to use.
You would want the original "conventional" image files.

The bitmaps I used (and which were already in a rectangular projection,
so they'd be exactly what you wanted anyway) came from a variety of sources.
I got a lot of them from Steve Albers' site :

http://laps.noaa.gov/albers/sos/sos.html

though he hasn't added any new ones for quite a while. There are some
excellent mosaics of Mercury from MESSENGER data at

http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/the_mission/mosaics.html

I got some admittedly now dated maps from

http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/

I'm pretty sure that I got a few from other odd places, but those are the
only sources I can recall off the top of my head and with a little searching
on my hard drive. If you see any Guide bitmaps that look particularly interesting,
let me know and I'll dig out a source and the original image I used.

The QWE format stores the image in a variety of sizes, so that when the
planet or satellite is only a few pixels on-screen, a bitmap a few pixels
across is read in; Guide only has to handle a full-size file when you zoom
in. For the Moon, for example, the maximum bitmap is something like
11520 by 23040 pixels. In that case, if you zoom in to look at a particular
crater, Guide can just grab the pixels it needs from that huge map and
ignore the rest. Also, some of the early bitmaps were made in an equal-area
cylindrical projection because of limitations in how Guide rendered planets
a few versions ago.

-- Bill

On 05/21/2015 05:53 AM, Bernd Klemt bernd.klemt@... [guide-user] wrote:
> Hello Bill, all,
>
> can anyone tell me where I can find the datasets for the images of the surfaces
> of the planets, especially that for earth? I looked in all directories, but
> couldn't find any "matching" file names.
>
> Are they displayable / editable with othe graphic programs? The reason I'm asking
> is that I want to transform them first into a rectangular projection and
> afterwards into a polar projection that can be displayed into the dome of our new
> planetarium projection system (the original idea can be seen here:
> http://www.lss-planetariums.info/index.php).
>
> We both have a 4.5 m dome and a 0.5 m transparent sphere to project the images
> in.
>
> Clear skies
> Bernd
>
> Bernd Klemt
>
> Sternwarte Herne, MPC code A18
> Herne, Germany
>
> e-mail: info@...
> http://www.sternwarte-herne.de
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
> Posted by: Bernd Klemt <bernd.klemt@...>
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