Hello Bill,

thanks for your really fast and comprehensive answer. The sources you mention is
just that what I was looking for. So no need for you to dig deeper.

Normally I use Guide for everything that has to do with astronomical
observations, imaging, telescope control and presentation. But for the display in
a planetarium dome with a beamer and a fisheye lens infront of it I have to use
Stellarium360 only because Guide is missing the right projection method.

Nevertheless I have to say thank you for a really great piece of software.

Clear skies
Bernd

> 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