Original Home Page with Links
Here is the Original LTVT Home Page Content with Links added to content within this wiki. Why do this?
- To make it easier to understand what LTVT's original goals and features were
- To help developers and testers learn LTVT and its derivatives
- To be a starting point for future development
- The intent is to feed it into a BDD (Behavior-Driven-Development) tool
The Lunar Terminator Visualization Tool (LTVT) is a free software tool for the intermediate to advanced student of lunar topography. It permits Moon images in a variety of formats to be located, viewed and compared with a uniform set of tools. It also permits highly accurate measurements to be made on those images.
- Accuracy
- Configurable and expandable by end user
- Ease of use
- Displays orthographic views of the Moon from any user-selected angle
- Can paint the lunar sphere with a variety of user-supplied imagery:
- Texture files covering the whole, or a part of, the Moon in simple cylindrical projection
- Maps in Mercator (e.g., equatorial LAC's), Transverse Mercator (e.g., LTO's) and Lambert (e.g., high latitude LAC's)
- Any actual photo taken from Earth or space, provided the date, time and camera location are known
- With optional digital elevation model (DEM) data, can paint the sphere with simulations of the expected pattern of light and shadow for any combination of viewing and lighting angles; including correct projection of the three-dimensional locations of the surface objects.
- On the painted sphere, can overlay on the dots encoding information specific to particular longitudes and latitudes, including:
- Nomenclature
- Point elevations
- Features of special interest
- Dot files available for complete current IAU nomenclature and major selenodetic control systems.
- Accurately plots the theoretical terminator position based on a user-supplied sub-solar point.
- Interactively displays the sun angle as the mouse is moved over the image.
- Can accurately compute the viewing and lighting geometry for any date from 1601-xxxx using optional JPL ephemeris files.
- Infinite zoom capability
- An unlimited number of instances of the program can be run simultaneously for overlay of images from different sources (similar to Photoshop "layers")
- Using the optional JPL ephemeris files, can predict past or future times when the terminator will be at a particular location relative to the surface features, based either on solar colongitude or on the sun angle at a particular feature.
- Can similarly tabulate past and future times when a given surface feature will be seen at a given distance from the disk center (due to varying librations).
- List of calibrated photos permanently stored on disk. List can be interrogated to automatically locate and display all calibrated photos showing a particular feature, ranked by sun angle.
- Can also search a list of dates and times of uncalibrated photos to locate ones that could potentially show a given feature with a particular lighting (if it happens to fall with the photo's field).
- Tools for:
- Altering Gamma of displayed texture/image.
- Identifying nearest feature in current dot file.
- Measuring distances and bearings in kilometers and degrees.
- Determining surface height differences based on the observed starting and ending points of solar shadows.
- Determining expected limit of visibility (theoretical limb circle) for a given sub-Earth point.
- Interactively drawing circles for accurately estimating (and optionally recording) the positions and diameters of circular features.
- Counting number of displayed dots.
- Saving annotated version of current screen display.
- LTVT works only on Windows-compatible PC's
- It displays best using the "Windows Classic" desktop theme (simple window borders)
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