The Detailed Topographic Lunar Atlas is here - a most detailed atlas of the Moon, showing the entire lunar surface in high resolution as you have never seen before!
The Moon is divided into two atlases: a near side and a far side atlas. This is the near side edition.
The atlas consists of 1204 individual topographic maps covering the entire near-side of the Earth’s Moon and providing graphical representations of the Moon’s surface at unprecedented levels of detail. A scale of 1:500,000 was adopted for all maps, with the exception of the polar maps which were set at 1:800,000. The maps were created on the basis three lunar Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) developed by NASA.
The maps include names and labels for:
- 6 Manned lunar landings
- 51 anthropological features of various nature
- 915 main craters
- 5418 satellite craters
- 11 crater chains (catena)
- 51 oceans, seas, bays, lakes and ponds (oceanus, mare, sinus, lacus and
palus)
- 54 mountains and promontories (mons, montes and promontorium)
- 131 valleys and fissures (vallis and rima)
- 46 ridges and escarpments (dorsa and rupes)
- 1141 dome features
A comprehensive index lists all named formations.
The PDFs can be easily navigated within PDF-readers or e-readers. Remarkable detail can be seen when maps are zoomed-in. Sample images (at left) have been down-sampled, but maps in atlas are displayed with more detail.
1231 pages, PDF download, colored, ISBN 978-3-949370-16-8, March 2025 (1st edition)
John W. Robbins was born outside of Chicago, Illinois in 1956 and began observing the Moon and skies starting at age ten. He received his B.Sci. in Surveying and Photogrammetry from California State University, Fresno in 1981, and his M.Sci. in Geodetic Science and Surveying from The Ohio State University in 1985. During his professional career, he provided research expertise in geometric geodesy, physical geodesy, tectonophysics, physical oceanography, planetology and ice sheet studies of Greenland and Antarctica, under contract for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in cooperation with the Laboratory for Terrestrial Physics and, more recently, with the Cryospheric Science Laboratory. He has co-authored over 100 scientific papers and presentations at international symposia. He’s a member of the American Geophysical Union, the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers, and is a lifetime member of the Experimental Aircraft Association. His cartographic skills have been refined over nearly five decades. With his retirement, early in 2025, he hopes to increase his astronomical observing and deepen his telescopic skills on lunar, planetary, and stellar scales.