The Indigestible

I mentioned last week that I’d assembled a few tabloid-sized posters for Yoshi’s room, in what I hope will be a successful attempt to instill wonder at the nature of … well, nature.

Below the fold is the first set of those posters, as JPEG previews with links to the PDFs (for high-res printing; these are pretty big files), in case anyone else wants them too.

There are other posters; I’ll put them up later. Enjoy!

This first item is a relief map of Mars; the depth of the northern ocean is prominent here, as is the Hellas basin. Sites of various landers have been added as well. Overall, a pretty cool image, and one that can help you imagine what Mars would look like if it still had seas.

Mars with landing sites PDF, 1.8 MB

This one is Mars’ surface along with a smattering of graphics at the bottom showing features in geyscaled relief, depth, a couple shots from the original Viking lander (which, though it hit planet a generation ago, was one hell of a piece of work that sent back images that fired almost everyone’s imaginations, from the producers of the TV version of The Martian Chronicles to the “Face on Mars” yahoos — and, of course, an entire planetful of burgeoning young scientists).

The last image is of the planet as a disc, showing the Tharsis Montes, Olympus Mons and the Valles Marineris. I generally think of this as the “Grandpa Simpson” image, because I think I can see the outline of Grandpa Simpson in 3/4 profile in the right half of the disc. He’s looking to the left.

General Mars images PDF, 3.8 MB

This is Venus, relief-mapped (by radar; the cloud cover is absolutely optically opaque). Along the bottom is the same terrain as a radar map; sets of images from the original Russian Venera probes (9, 10 and 14, respectively), and a contrast-enhanced shot of the planet’s disc.

The Venera probes’ images are just damned cool. The terrain looks flattened and tortured; the extreme curve is due to the lenses used. Venus is not only uninhabitable, but actually quite hellish; the surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead, and the carbon-dioxide atmosphere is so dense that a dropped penny would flutter to the surface rather than simply drop in a straight line.

General Venus images PDF, 3.7 MB

And our closest neighbor. The upper cylindrical projection presents the far side in addition to the maria-pocked face we’re familiar with. Below are shots of Earthrise and a moon buggy beside a lander — contrary to inane myth, humans actually have in fact been to the Moon — as well as some lunar phases.

General Moon images PDF, 3.1 MB

TTBOMK the images I’ve used are generally available; I’m certainly not employing them for profit, just remixing them a little for attractive and interesting presentation on a kid’s bedroom wall.