Update albedo texture of the Moon

[10110111]

This replaces the albedo texture of the Moon with my own processing of the LROC WAC-based normalized maps, as described here but in equirectangular projection instead of HiPS and with additional color balancing to make the texture grayish.

This makes the poles much less different in apparent quality from other regions, and avoids the blurry version of them suggested in #4782.

[gzotti]

Funny that you write

color-balanced to yield the grayish look of the texture

I thought this also just pushes through the reddish hue you wanted to add in #3041...

[10110111]

Well it does have a little bit of redness compared to the old image, but I think it's rather subtle, so can be ignored. If you want, I can try to make it as neutral as possible.

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On Fri, 13 Mar 2026, 23:42 Georg Zotti, ***@***.***> wrote: *gzotti* left a comment (Stellarium/stellarium#4816) <#4816 (comment)> Funny that you write color-balanced to yield the grayish look of the texture I thought this also just pushes through the reddish hue you wanted to add in #3041 <#3041>... — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#4816 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABQU3MWULUFBOCXLIZXFJT34QQUADAVCNFSM6AAAAACWRFG5FCVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHM2DANJWGA4TONRTGU> . You are receiving this because you were assigned.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[Atque]

Wow, this looks very good! It is practically impossible to see the "bad area" above 70 lat now.

[10110111]

For reference, here's the original image before gray-balancing:

And here's how it'd look if we strive to reach maximal neutrality (here I used the criterion that GIMP's resize to 1px×1px yields identical values in RGB channels):

[gzotti]

Yes, I prefer the neutral image. It's just IMV not a pink disk when seen small enough. Neutral, or yellowed/orange on the horizon. On beige/reddish hues in closeup, see discussion in #3041, I can imagine a fov-based hue adaptation (actually similar to white balance adjustment in photography) when the Moon fills a larger part of the screen. But that's beyond this texture change. (And yes, texture has nice detail!)