Astronomers of the past have named large, flat areas on the Moon's surface Mare, Latin for Sea. Whether or not they actually believed that these were real seas on our satellite, we now have the means to see what the Moon would look like, were it actually partially covered with water. The interactive map below uses altitude data from NASA's Clementine mission (I thank Larry Kellogg of Lunar Prospector fame for providing this "unofficial" data set).
To use this program, set the sea level altitude to the level of your choosing (meaningful values are between -5000 and 10000 meters), and click the Redraw button. On slower computers, it may take a bit of time for the map to update itself.
Astronomers of the past have named large, flat areas on the Moon's surface Mare, Latin for Sea. Whether or not they actually believed that these were real seas on our satellite, we now have the means to see what the Moon would look like, were it actually partially covered with water. The interactive map below uses altitude data from NASA's Clementine mission.
To use this program, set the sea level altitude to the level of your choosing (meaningful values are between -5000 and 10000 meters), and click the Redraw button. On slower computers, it may take a bit of time for the map to update itself.
I did the Seas of Mars, I played with the Seas of Venus, I even experimented with the seas of the Moon... until someone asked an interesting question: why don't I do a Seas of Earth page?
Intriguing idea. We all know what the map of the Earth looks like, but what would it look like if our planet had a lot more, or a lot less, water?
Finding altitude data for our home planet wasn't terribly difficult: It didn't take long to stumble upon the ETOPO2 database, where I found downloadable data sets, which I quickly converted to the format that my applet can accept. So here it is: your very own Earth to experiment with!
To use this program, set the sea level altitude to the level of your choosing (meaningful values are between -10000 and 10000 meters), and click the Redraw button. On slower computers, it may take a bit of time for the map to update itself.
The inspiration for the original version of this program came from the Astronomy Picture of the Day Web site.
This page contains JavaScript code to convert between dates in various formats.
In its present form, it does not take into account leap seconds and other sub-minute corrections. Also, the calculation of the Excel date may be incorrect for dates prior to March 1, 1900 (Microsoft Excel apparently believes that 1900 was a leap year.)
