Jim Mosher's Lunar Terminator Visualization Tool
The Lunar Terminator Visualization Tool (LTVT) has been improved out of all recognition since I first constructed my Home page. It was originally written by Jim Mosher and updated with the help and cooperation of Henrik Bondo. It has become an incredibly powerful tool to manipulate lunar images from all sources.
John Moore has written and published a 316-page User Guide (ISBN: 9798741026977) currently (March 2022) only available from Amazon EU (UK price £12.40 paperback, or £10.13 Kindle). This is a very comprehensive guide to software that can be a bit daunting at first sight but, with the help of this book, becomes a straightforward tool that can do incredible things.
There are three places from which the software and supporting files can be downloaded:
- Jim Mosher has made all his source code (in Delphi 6) and all his support files available as a 1.1 Gb zip file as ltvt_20180429-HTML.zip from here.
- John Moore has made available all the necessary files to launch a fully working LTVT. Mostly these are taken from Jim's original set but a few are updated to make some improvements. These may be obtained from here.
- Jon Teets has also made a complete set of files available as a zip download from here. This is an excellent site with all the files neatly layed out.
What follows is a selection only of the features available from LTVT. Many of them require support files which can be found amongst the files downloaded from any of the above sources.
- Calibration of a User or Satellite Image. This is necessary before any other option can be applied to your own image. It requires knowledge of the date and time the picture was taken, the location from which it was taken, and two calibration points in the picture. These latter are identifiable features in the picture for which lunar coordinates are known (available for very many features in an associated file).
- Name other features in the image.
- Draw a curve which is a true circle on the Moon.
- Draw observer's limb for satellite images.
- Draw height contours.
- Show a feature from overhead.
- Identify and label the nearest named feature.
- Display a scene with a different cartographic projection.