Tag: Selenography

Hemispherical maps of Lunar surface topography showing near and far sides of the Moon. The Moon’s far side is far more heavily cratered than the near side. This is largely because the near side’s thinner crust allowed ancient volcanic eruptions to flood large basins with lava, smoothing over impact scars and creating the dark “maria”. The far side’s thicker crust prevented this resurfacing, leaving its ancient craters exposed and preserved for billions of years.

This digital elevation model (DEM) is based on data from the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA; Smith et al., 2010), an instrument on the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft (Tooley et al., 2010).

The Scientific colour map ‘turku‘ is used to represent the data accurately and to all readers.

• Creator: Fabio Crameri
• This version: 24.08.2026
• License: Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)
• Specific citation: This graphic by Fabio Crameri adjusted from Crameri et al. (2020) is available via the open-access s-ink.org repository.
• Related reference: –

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Global map of Lunar surface topography providing a detailed view on the Moon’s surface elevation. The visualisation reveals the dramatic contrast between the ancient, heavily cratered highlands and the smoother volcanic plains known as the maria. These dark basaltic plains filled in massive impact basins Billions of years ago, while the lighter, higher-elevation regions preserve some of the oldest terrain in the solar system. The map highlights major basins like South Pole-Aitken, one of the largest impact craters known, along with mountain ranges pushed up by ancient collisions.

This digital elevation model (DEM) is based on data from the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA; Smith et al., 2010), an instrument on the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft (Tooley et al., 2010). The created DEM represents more than 6.5 billion measurements gathered between July 2009 and July 2013. The Scientific colour map ‘turku‘ is used to represent the data accurately and to all readers.

• Creator: Fabio Crameri
• Original version: 02.09.2021
• This version: 24.08.2026
• License: Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)
• Specific citation: This graphic by Fabio Crameri adjusted from Crameri et al. (2020) is available via the open-access s-ink.org repository.
• Related reference: Crameri, F., G.E. Shephard, and P.J. Heron (2020), The misuse of colour in science communication, Nature Communications, 11, 5444. doi:10.1038/s41467-020-19160-7

Faulty or missing link? – Please report them via a reply below!