Apollo 11 Tranquility Base Scenery for Orbiter 2016

Tranquility Base is the actual landing site of Eagle, the Apollo 11's lunar module. It was named by Neil Armstrong on the spot right after touchdown and it lies 5 miles off to the originally planned landing site due to some navigation errors.

On this page you'll find the scenery files (texture and elevation maps) for the Tranquility Base and a few miles of the surrounding neighbourhood. These files significantly improve the visuals compared to what you could get even with the official HD lunar textures of Orbiter 2016. To see this scenery working in Orbitersim take a look at my Apollo 11 landing video (you may fast-forward till 8:20 when the new textures appear first):

The texture map in this scenery was based on LROC NAC imagery (M1118730984L and M1118730984R were the actual images I've used). The color and the brightness of the source images were fitted to Orbiter's standard HD lunar textures, to avoid the "decal-effect". However unlike the standard textures I opted to use photos with overhead lighting conditions and the shadowing relies solely on the detailed elevation map. The elevation data came from Apollo 11 DTM which is also a product of the LROC team NAC_DTM_APOLLO11). Max LOD for surface texture is 18LOD, elevation is 17LOD.

To install them, download and extract these zip files into Orbiter's main folder:

• Tranquility Base Elevation map (Version 1)
• Tranquility Base Texture map (Version 1)

It works smoothly with Orbiter 2016 Beta (and I guess even with the stable branch also however I haven't tested it), though the improvement isn't spectacular. These are the screenshots with standalone Orbiter 2016 Beta (Orbiter.exe):

I strongly suggest to use these texture packs with Orbiter2016 Beta+D3D9Client, as it significantly improves the attainable resolution. The screenshots with the same camera positions as before are showing a significant improvement: