What is this?

A small Python package aimed at extracting cutouts of lunar craters from a larger dataset of lunar elevation. The dataset is an 8 GB digital elevation model based on the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft.

What can it do?

It provides a few convenience scripts for processing the LOLA dataset. For example, it can make a cutout around the Tycho crater and warp it to get rid of projection errors (i.e. craters are generally circles, not ellipses), saving it into a .tif file:

from moon import io as mio

mio.crater_cutout('tycho', destNameOrDestDS="tycho.tif", format="GTIFF")

A (rudimentary) simple flask API is provided, serving the .tif cutouts:

• On server side: export FLASK_APP=lunar_api.py; python -m flask run
• On client side: curl http://127.0.0.1:5000/craters\?name=tycho --output tycho.tif

What can I do with the .tif cutouts?

Example #1: inject them in interactive visualizations (click here for a demo).

Example #2: open and plot the elevation with rasterio:

import rasterio
import rasterio.plot as rioplot
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

dem = rasterio.open('tycho.tif')
ax = rioplot.show(dem, title='Tycho crater')
ax.set_xlabel('meters')
ax.set_ylabel('meters')

References

• Explanation and full list of data references for LOLA dataset: link
• Tables of lunar features come from the International Astronomical Union Planetary Gazetteer: can be downloaded as .csv here, with a good read on all the history behind the moon feature naming here