Not that just looks too cool, Gramp. Really does look real.

@lylejk

Yoicks!

I forgot where I was! ...rubbin elbows in here with folks who can make an image every bit MORE REAL than that one!

Oblig. Disclaimer: For my part, _I_ had to resort to actually MAKING a real one. (That's a picture of a real objek.)

Wow; you have talent then. lol

You created an object file than milled it, or did you eyeball the result? Still, fantastic result Gramp.

Eyeballed it? With my broken glasses??

No, I milled it. From the real lunar data--which I only had to run, hands-held all the way!, through my favorite Astrophysical-GeoGRAPHICal processor package: the GIMP w/G'MIC!

Yes, [edit: he finally gets around to admitting...] I milled it on a home-made machine--which proved way less accurate in life than on paper--and let IT eyeball it. :^)

Thanks, Lyle, but not nearly as Gosh! as the stuff you routinely offer for general astoundment.

An update from 2019 (back because I'm looking for a similar way to process a flat projection of the earth into curvilinear "squares").

After I had cut the thing out, I gave it to a friend who works in the "Spaces Sciences" building at UW-Madison, with half a hope that it would catch some astronomer's eye.

Well. It did, and quite quickly.

Here's the Deeply Mortifying secret behind all my "genius":
My friend reported that an astronomer who had stopped at his IT helpdesk picked it up and said, "INTERESTING!"

My chest was swelling, until he went on to say that the astronomer said, "Usually, you see views of the moon as either the visible or the dark side; I've never seen anyone do the LEFT side and RIGHT sides before."

:embarrased:

In my obsession with "the Data", I had assumed that the FRONT side of the moon was in the MIDDLE of the image, but it happened that it was on either the LHS or the RHS, so when I cut out the center, I actually cut out a "side"...

Wow. It's even more unique than I thought (from the Latin "unus" meaning "one" and "equus" meaning "horse.")

gramp, it's a rare opportunity in the world to laugh out loud at a mathematics story, but this one is perfect. Thanks for sharing it.

Let me hasten to add I do not understand the math itself that you and the other contributors provided, but I do understand getting tripped up by what's usually a "gift" of being able to bring high focus and attention to detail to a project. It's never easy finding you've become -- even if only a for a moment -- a horse's unus.

Thanks, neurolurker.

Esp. for rearranging the words to make more picturesque what I have become! If only for a moment. ;^)

It's Nutty how long it took me to find the link to the G'MIC Reference Manual--given that it's actually in a straightforward place, but "I Relied On Web Searching." which I could see as one of the front-runners for my epitaph...

Anyway, it's right there on the G'MIC home page:
http://gmic.eu

under the "Resources" top-menu button, where the link is named:
G'MIC Technical Reference

which takes you to the 460 pages of A Little Bit of Heaven:
https://gmic.eu/reference.shtml

Once there, you can find out stuff like: "How to program an 'if()' in Cartesian Transform" and stufflikethatthere.


EDIT: WHOOPS! NO you can't! The word "Cartesian" is not found in the manual for what I can only guess are quixotic reasons.