space2026

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.

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!

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...

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.

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!

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.

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

Should be fixed for Safari now :)

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 :)

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/

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.

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!

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

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

Oh yea, noted. We'll update it today

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

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

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

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

Interesting. I always wondered why IrfanView -> Image -> Convert to Grayscale doesn't look quite right