How the map is assembled
Four steady steps take a public dataset from its source to a layer you can trust on screen. Nothing is hidden and nothing is rewritten along the way.
- Collect We start from openly licensed planetary terrain data and record where each file came from, along with its licence and the date we fetched it.
- Align Layers are reprojected onto a shared frame and cut into tiles, so a hill sits in the same place no matter which dataset is switched on.
- Annotate Notes and markers are stored next to their coordinates. A comment never drifts away from the point it describes, even after the tiles are refreshed.
- Export Anything you make can be written out as plain, portable files and opened in other tools. The door swings both ways.
What this is not
This is not a source of new measurements and it does not replace the archives it draws from. We do not invent data, fill gaps with guesses, or present a reconstruction as a photograph. Where a layer is uncertain, we say so in plain words.
It is also deliberately not a general-purpose GIS. We would rather do a few reading tasks very well than imitate a full desktop suite in a browser.