Hello guys, I'm posting a video that I took through the window of my spaceship during my last trip to the moon. Don't you think so?

Okay, now seriously, this is a very complex animation in 16:9 format with 1600 to 900 pixels and 1500 frames, which I created from my 40 panel panorama mosaic of the moon along the terminator on March 11th, 2022. I captured the mosaic in high resolution with my C14 (see Revision B).

After I was able to achieve a nice 3D effect by morphing two offset images of the crater Moretus:

3D-Animation of Moretus ( Henning Schmidt ) - AstroBin

My goal was now a realistic flight over the lunar surface. So I started looking for a solution a year and a half ago. I didn't realize at the beginning how difficult this journey would be.

"I choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

First, I saw a short, heavily pixelated orbit animation in the spaceweather.com gallery created with the Starry Night software. This software allows you to project your own moon image onto the moon sphere. However, I quickly discovered that the usable resolution was severely limited and the beautiful details of my panorama were lost. Despite repeated requests to the developers, no solution could be provided. Then I discovered the program “Blender”. A higher resolution is possible here, but the control is so complicated that it would probably have taken me another year to implement my project. Finally I saw a crater animation by Gérard Finet here at astrobin:

https://www.astrobin.com/vlevp9/

Now I saw an opportunity to use the free software QGIS to realize my ideas with an underlying height grid (by NASA /JAXA - Lunar_LRO_LOLAKaguya_DEMmerge_60N60S_512ppd) and achieve a beautiful spatial effect. After initial euphoria, I realized that QGIS alone is not the final solution. Although you can create an orbit animation in the program, you can only save it in individual jpg frames. So you still need a program to merge the individual images. After a long search I chose Losslesscut. In addition, the individual images generated in QGIS had image errors such as white pixels. I had to remove around 600 such pixels manually and go through all 1500 frames. I apologize for the two or three small stutters in the video, these are due to the software. A flight over the moon is not entirely smooth when the correction drives fire. This makes the video even more realistic LOL ... To create the profile point I had to set approx in QGIS. 2000 position points (= 1000 pairs) manually because of the spatial distortion. That alone took 8 hours. If you add the image capture of the mosaic and its image processing, the project probably took more than 100 hours. I think this work was worth it.

Tommi Ropponen's tutorial was very helpful when working with QGIS:

https://www.ursa.fi/fileadmin/ursa2010/Harrastus/Ryhmatapaamiset/aktapaaminen/2021/Kuukuvat_QGIS_ropponen.pdf

Special thanks to Salvatore for implementing the new video module. This module makes it possible for such films to be shown without long waiting times despite their size (here: 1GB).