In 2020 I decided to attempt to take enough pictures of Mars to create a map of the entire planet. It was an ambitious goal, but it seemed like fun and something I hadn’t seen other people try.

Originally I had set out to write my own software to turn photographs of planets into map projections, but after a while it became apparent that WinJupos was better at this than my software was ever going to be. WinJupos has a bit of a learning curve, but after a few YouTube tutorials I only have to focus on taking good images!

WinJupos takes your location and the time that you took your photo to estimate the exact face of the planet you are looking at. From that information it can also unwrap your image into a mercator projection map, meaning with enough photos you can fill in an entire planetary map!

The results were pretty astounding for a backyard telescope, this was a really fun project!

Mars

Initially I did a test run with pictures I took of Jupiter. Obviously, Jupiter’s surface isn’t static, but it allowed me to get used to the WinJupos software and refine my process. After seeing my mistakes and issues I was able to solidify my process for Mars. Essentially, I locked down my camera settings so the color and brightness would be as stable as possible across all images. The procedure worked, though some nights were slightly hazy which through off the brightness somewhat. After a bit of photoshopping I was able to normalize the colors enough so that they blended relatively seamlessly. In New Jersey I can’t get that many clear nights in a row so you have to work with what you have!

Each photo made a single piece of the map, and I combined them together in StarStax to create the full map. StarStax worked well, but it’s clearly not meant for this purpose, so some manual touch-ups were needed. The north pole of the planet was facing away from Earth during this imaging window, so the northern latitudes are a mysterious black.

Once I was able to make a map I was then able to wrap that map as a texture onto a sphere, which gives me a fully CG Mars! Now I can have fun annotating the map, animating it, whatever I’d like!

Current Map as of Fall 2020:

compared to NASA’s map:

Clearly I can’t stand up to images NASA takes from Mars orbit, but I’m extremely pleased at how similar the maps are! Nearly all the major features on the NASA map can be seen on mine.

There is also some fun we can have with this map:

And if we apply my map as a texture to a 3D sphere we can make a full digital globe of the planet Mars, as seen from my New Jersey backyard!