In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

It's featured as today's Astronomy Picture of the Day, but it's also discussed over Slashdot in a story named High Resolution Global Topographic Map of Moon.

The APoD summary: "This colorful topographical map of the Moon is centered on the lunar farside, the side not seen from planet Earth. That view is available to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter though, as the spacecraft's wide angle camera images almost the entire lunar surface every month. Stereo overlap of the imaging has allowed the computation of topographical maps with coverage between 80 degrees north and south latitude. The results have about a 300 meter resolution on the lunar surface and 10 to 20 meter elevation accuracy. Data closer to the north and south poles is filled in using the orbiter's laser altimeter. In this map, white, red, green, and purple represent progressively lower elevations. In fact, the large circular splotch tending to purple hues at the bottom is the farside's South Pole-Aitken Basin. About 2500 kilometers in diameter and over 12 kilometers deep, it is one of the largest impact basins in the Solar System."

In June 2009 we announced the release by the METI and NASA of the free global topography dataset named "ASTER GDEM", and Version 2 with significant improvements has just been released earlier this month.

From the article: "The improved version of the map adds 260,000 additional stereo-pair images to improve coverage. It features improved spatial resolution, increased horizontal and vertical accuracy, more realistic coverage over water bodies and the ability to identify lakes as small as 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) in diameter. The map is available online to users everywhere at no cost. [...] The ASTER data cover 99 percent of Earth's landmass and span from 83 degrees north latitude to 83 degrees south. Each elevation measurement point in the data is 98 feet (30 meters) apart."

Here's a direct link to the ASTER GDEM website. See also previous news regarding ASTER GDEM. Of course, if you have an interesting in the ASTER GDEM, make sure you know about the SRTM-DEM CGIAR-CSI Version 4 too.