The Moon Rotating

April 20, 2017

[引用] A huge payoff from the longevity of the LRO mission is the repeat coverage obtained by the LROC Wide Angle Camera (WAC). The WAC has a very wide field-of-view (FOV), 90° in monochrome mode and 60° in multispectral mode, hence its name. On the one hand, the wide FOV enables orbit-to-orbit stereo, which allowed LROC team members at the DLR to create the unprecedented 100 meter scale near-global (0° to 360° longitude and 80°S to 80°N latitude) topographic map of the Moon (the GLD100)!

It looks like rendered computer graphics, but it’s just physics, as SonicSubculture on Reddit points out:

It’s actually not distorted or unrealistic at all – it’s just UNLIT and it’s messing with everybody’s vision because we’re so used to seeing specular highlights and shading on spheres. Features are advancing as expected on a sphere, but it’s lit as though it’s a flat circle - or as though every point has an even level of illumination.

Another thing people are pointing out is about how perfectly spherical it is. At this scale, everything looks like a perfect sphere, thanks to our old pal big G – gravity!

via NASA/ASU