Exporting

Exporting

An export draws the names, your drawings and your measurements into your image, at its own resolution.

The rule LunarAtlas never breaks: your picture is never enlarged. 1:1 or smaller, always.

Press Export in the viewer's status bar.

The preview on the right is the real thing, in miniature, and follows every choice you make.

Region — how much of the picture

Whole image	Everything, at its full size.
Current view	Exactly what you are looking at now.
Around feature	The area around the name you have selected. Select one first.

Scale — how big the file is

1:1 keeps every pixel you captured. 1:2 halves it. Longest side lets you give a number — handy for a forum or a post, where a 200-megapixel mosaic is not welcome.

Format

TIFF	16-bit. The archival choice; keeps everything.
PNG	16-bit, compressed, widely readable.
JPEG	8-bit, quality 92 by default. Smallest, for sharing.

Include

Tick what belongs in the picture:

• Names, exactly as you left them in Layers — including the ones you hid and moved;
• Crater outlines;
• Lat/lon grid, labelled along the equator and the central meridian;
• Your drawings and measurements;
• Info block — capture time, phase, your optics, a scale bar and north/east arrows;
• North up, east right — turns the picture so lunar north is up, never mirrored. Turning by anything other than a right angle makes the canvas larger, with black corners. It works on the whole picture or around a feature, but not with "current view".

The Output line at the bottom always says exactly what you will get.

What comes out

A whole disk, exported at 1800 px with everything on:

The same photo, exported around Copernicus, sized from the crater's own diameter:

Names are drawn in one colour, with maria in larger spaced capitals and a soft shadow so they stay readable over bright terrain. Night-side names are dimmed or hidden by where the Sun actually was.

Where it goes

Next to the photo, in Pictures/LunarAtlas, named after the original (NAME_atlas.tif, or NAME_atlas_Copernicus.jpg when you exported around a feature). When the export finishes, a button shows it in Finder, Explorer, or your Linux file manager.

Exports are written through a temporary file, so an export you cancel never leaves a half-written picture behind.

Exporting many photos at once

The app does one photo at a time. For a whole evening's session, the command line has batch:

python3 lunaratlas/lunaratlas.py batch ~/Pictures/session --max-size 2400

See The command line, which also lists every export option in full — several of them (fonts, label density, which classes of names, JPEG quality) are not in the dialog.