[X] My Assistant

[Steve G]

I rarely make comments but I am on this site every single day. Though I admire the global mapping efforts made from spacecraft images, I dearly miss the airbrush maps we had in the seventies by J.L. Inge and P.M Bridges. I wish we'd go back to those.

[elakdawalla]

Yeah, I think that what made those airbrushed maps so special and different from photographic products is that they represented topography as much as (or more than!) they represented albedo. The shaded-relief MOLA maps are really nice products. Mattias Malmer's 3D modeling work in the Rosetta thread is a fine example of how topographic data is essential to that realistic feel of a map; and the reason Bjorn Jonsson's work on the Dawn Vesta data looks so good is because he's projecting albedo images onto topographic data. I look forward to having the Dawn topographic data set at Ceres that will allow us to make shaded-relief maps. And now I want to see shaded-relief maps of the major moons of the solar system -- I can't recall that I've ever seen anyone produce those.