Show HN: Open-source high-res Mars map, in natural colors | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Open-source high-res Mars map, in natural colors

mars26.com

150 pointsspace202647 comments

Hi HN, we are a small team of space fans who simply wanted a better Mars map.

Read about our motivation and process here https://medium.com/mars26/the-most-detailed-mars-map-yet-717....

If you do want to keep up to date, feel free to follow us on Twitter. More features are in the pipeline https://twitter.com/marstwentysix

We love PRs and love to hear your feedback on https://github.com/mars-2026/mars26_com!

— Space P at Mars26.com

What is the fundamental dataset used for it? In recent years more probes have done Mars imaging, which probe has given the highest resolution images?

They primarily use CTX, but HiRISE has the highest resolution, 0.25-0.5m/pixel.

Right. HiRISE is awesome, but covers only roughly 5% of Mars surface. Check the blog we posted above [1], it gives very detailed explanation on that.

[1] https://medium.com/mars26/the-most-detailed-mars-map-yet-717...

Kudos - awesome work guys - I am trying to find a good spot my great great great grandkids could build on :)

oh you will love the features we have on the backlog :)

Awesome! Curious if the team has plans or interest in building an open-source high-res map of the Moon as well? Or does Google Moon avoid the low-res shortcomings of Google Mars?

There are great high-res maps of Moon out there already. E.g https://carto.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer3d/index.html Whereas for Mars somehow nobody had worked on it yet. That said, I could see us hosting a similar site for Moon, too!

This looks pretty awesome.

First thing I notice is that scrolling a tiny bit fills my browser back button history with one address per scroll tick? That rather rude.

Thanks! Great feedback. We've opened an issue and will fix soon https://github.com/mars-2026/mars26_com/issues/1

Very neat, but there are only a few places on Mars I recognize well enough to find. It would be good to have a list of points of interest and a way to go to them.

There's also a Twitter symbol at one point on the globe; not sure why?

Nice idea! We'll add a feature layer with points of interest.

Clicking the Twitter symbol should show you somebody's tweet on that position. Works in Chrome, and we'll add support for Firefox (soon) which currently blocks it

It would be good to add a way to toggle that layer too.

Yea, that should be rather straight forward with the Esri API. We should be able to find some time to add it by next week.

Does it support driving directions and traffic overlay?

Well, it's technically possible to serve any feature layer via the API.. I'd assume there isn't that much traffic though. Although I've heard air traffic is picking up lately, even some nuclear-powered rovers

I want to like it but its pretty rough as-is. I feel the colors need lot of tweaking to look right, the blending in between missing data on both ctx and viking needs to be improved. Right now the pretty red planet looks sickly and moldy, with awkward artifacts all over the place.

Compare e.g. the surroundings of Jezero crater (Percys landing site) on this Mars26 vs HRSC data:

https://mars26.com/#heading=0&latitude=18.628109809050898&lo...

https://maps.planet.fu-berlin.de/#map=8/4646647.81/1124272.2

Or this region; I'm pretty sure its not supposed to be blue: https://mars26.com/#heading=359.79651286245115&latitude=-40....

Thanks for the feedback! Yes, it is hard to get right. That's why neither NASA nor Google have a great blend.

The artifacts should be mostly gone with our next version which we are rendering in the next few days.

Greyish areas come from areas where Viking imagery is mostly black. We also updated this part in the next model. Thouhg, that's a tough one.

Let's see how you like the next version!

Are you also adjusting the overall color? Your images have now strong pinkish cast instead of the more natural orangeish tones.

For parts where viking data is not usable, maybe filling in the color information based upon surrounding area would make at least prettier end result.

Yes, those are two really good points. What we do is first we have to find a middle ground on color, contrast, brightness between all Viking photographs. Because there are differences between each. Then we make a decision of what an average color looks like.

Filling in an average color for the overexposed areas is what we'll do for version 1.0 coming in a few days. Running locally it does already look quite nice. Hope it will turn out well on the web app!

Looks good! I like the atmospheric halo around the planet when you zoom out being dependant on the light direction and the angle you're looking at the planet from.

I've tried to get a grasp of how it's working on the 3D side by having a look at the github sourcecode, but seems like it's all managed by the "sceneview" module from the ArcGIS software as opposed to a custom implementation, is it?

Thanks! That's right. We did look into more open alternatives, but went with ArcGIS and spent our time on the image processing instead. Could be cool to build an alternative site eg. with Leaflet.

Very neat! Nice work! Your Twitter app permission list is very excessive tho.

Oh yea, noted. We'll update it today

The Murray Lab has done great work on the CTX imagery (which this is based on), and it's also pretty well documented. If you are interested in that sort of thing you can read about it here: http://murray-lab.caltech.edu/CTX/index.html

Are you using the public beta dataset, or did you get access to more refined data?

They are great! We use their public beta CTX images. When we contacted them, they said the blended CTX images will be out of beta by end of the year :)

>While Google’s Mars map uses low resolution images taken in the 70’s

Have you checked out Google Earth for Mars? (not Google mars). It provides hi-rise images, and in 3d.

Good point. Google has two Mars Maps. Both are okay-ish. But not good enough really. Let me explain.

Google Mars Maps[1] shows images from the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC)[2], which produces grey scale and up to 1.5m per pixel. Not quite what we aim for nor what we think is enough.

Google Earth Pro is another one. I appreciate you bring it up, and I'll add a remark to the blog post.

What I like about Google Earth' Mars map is that it offers multiple layers of different quality images, similar to NASA's Mars Trek[3]. Besides, it presents a globe view. Both helps conceptualize the whole experience.

However, Google Earth is missing a lot.

First, we built a web app. Easy access for everybody.

Second, we want to present the real Mars. An image just like you would stand in front of it, like Google Earth for Earth: True color, no jumps between image tiles.

NASA does a better job than Google at that. However, neither show natural color, combined with high resolution.

Google Earth uses a blend of Viking imagery, just like we do. However, they use MOC instead of CTX imagery for that. Which results in somewhat high-res too, but they managed to make it look cut up and unnatural. Their CTX map is low coverage, and of course grey scale.

Our solution: We merge natural color photographs with high-resolution images to offer one combined image. And we'll add elevation in 2-3 days.

[1] https://www.google.com/mars/ [2] http://www.msss.com/all_projects/mgs-mars-orbiter-camera.php [3] https://trek.nasa.gov/mars/

Only at Google would;

-Google Earth

-Google Mars

-Google Earth for Mars

...be three things. Just make Google Earth with a planet drop-down.

Edit: seems like this is an option on Google Maps(?)

What they need is a fourth app called Google Planet

there seems to be excessive distorsion at the poles. Is this for a lack of data, or is it due to the coordinate system?

The poles are the most interesting part to me, but there doesn't seem to be a way to control lighting, so they are at least partially obscured. Moreover, I'd have expected the terminator to be less fuzzy due to Mars' thin atmosphere, but it might be just me.

The coordinate system changes from equirectangular to polar stereo. The poles just don't get good imagery from the MRO. I work extensively with HiRISE data which is collected from the same orbiter as the CTX data this map uses.

Btw, it breaks the back button atleast on Firefox when navigating. I think its because of 302 redirects from the backend?

Appreciate the feedback! I assume you mean the issue mentioned before[1]. We've opened an issue on github and will fix soon

[1] https://github.com/mars-2026/mars26_com/issues/1

Sammie in chrome mobile

Oh god, did Twitter infect mars already?

Is there an actual image of the mars surface somewhere? I poked around the repo but could not find one.

I think this is where the app loads the images from a server

https://github.com/mars-2026/mars26_com/blob/main/src/compon...

Yes, we are hosting an WMTS server which serves images corresponding to a user's current coordinates and zoom level. One image of the whole surface in full-res would be about 150 GB.

Attempting to zoom in or out on my iPhone 12 freezes the site. I’m using Safari.

Thanks for the feedback! Added it to the list :) https://github.com/mars-2026/mars26_com/issues/4

Similar problem here, a single action works (pan or zoom), then the map is frozen and I can’t do anything. I’m using the latest Safari on an iPad Pro.

Same on my macbook pro (Safari, latest macOS).

Should be fixed for Safari now :)

When zoomed out black tweets do not show against the backdrop of space.

Right. It works in Chrome so far. Firefox blocks the Twitter part. We have opened an issue already and should be working on it soon.

Oh wow! Awesome work!

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