[X] My Assistant

[chuckclark]

Not that I mean to compare Itokawa to a sausage, just to show you behind the scenes of making the map, along with the map itself, here, rather than continue to clog up the Hayabusa Return to Earth thread.
Here is the map itself, so far along as the pasting in of the mosaic has gone.
And here is are two shots of the folded up map, compared with the computer-made model. Note the arrow to one of the "ears." The first try of the map failed to capture the ear, so I replotted the boundary, as seen in the Tracing image.
All photos credit: Sara Adkins Studio

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[Phil Stooke]

Very interesting, Chuck, and there is a good reason for this. The cylindrical projection map assumes there is a unique location on the surface for any latitude-longitude coordinate pair. But at the location you are having trouble with, this breaks down for Itokawa - the surface is so irregular that a radius from the center of mass cuts the surface more than once. It's a well known cartographic problem for mapping irregular shapes, and it occurs on other bodies too. Your method independently discovers it. In this area of my map the image is messed up, but in a future version it could be fudged a bit better.

Phil