Apollo Landing Sites for Orbiter 2016

Detailed scenery files covering the neighbourhood of Apollo landing sites could be found here. These sceneries are made for Orbiter2016 and usually have two parts: elevation maps and surface textures. These two are usually independent from each other and could be installed separately, however to get the best visual experience it is recommended to use both of them together. To install them unzip the downloaded files into Orbiters top folder.

Downloads

Landing Site Elevation Surface Texture Screenshot
Apollo 11 - Tranquility Base Apollo_11_LS_Elevation_v1.2.zip Apollo_11_LS_Texture_v1.1.zip
Apollo 12 - Oceanus Procellarum Apollo_12_LS_Elevation_v1.1.zip Apollo_12_LS_Texture_v1.0.zip
Apollo 13 & 14 - Fra Mauro Apollo_13_14_LS_Elevation_v1.0.zip Apollo_13_14_LS_Texture_v1.0.zip
Apollo 15 - Hadley-Apennine Apollo_15_LS_Elevation_v1.0.zip Apollo_15_LS_Texture_v1.0.zip
Apollo 16 - Descartes Highlands Apollo_16_LS_Elevation_v1.0.zip Apollo_16_LS_HighIllum_Texture_v1.0.zip

Apollo_16_LS_LowIllum_Texture_v1.0.zip
Apollo 17 - Taurus-Littrow Apollo_17_LS_Elevation_v1.0.zip Apollo_17_LS_HighIllum_Texture_v1.0.zip

As the Tranquility Base was the first scenery I've created, it has it's own separate page with some details on how these sceneries files were created.

Accuracy

To illustrate the precision of these elevation maps, see this comparison of a photo of Hadley rille made by Jim Irwin during Apollo 15 mission and the corresponding screenshot from Orbiter2016:

Compatibility

Standard Orbiter 2016 is unable to handle vertical resolution finer than 1 meter in case of elevation maps, so it won't work with these, only with the surface textures. To use both sets of maps, Orbiter 2016 Beta should be used. These are the screenshots with Orbiter 2016 Beta but without the D3D9Client graphical engine (what is started as Orbiter.exe):
West Crater and LM5, looking to west West Crater and LM5, looking to north-west LM5, looking to north

I strongly suggest to use these texture packs with Orbiter2016 Beta+D3D9Client, as it significantly improves the attainable resolution. With the current versions, the best visual results could be achieved by setting surface elevation mode to "linear interpolation" and max. resolution level to 18 in Visual effects menu. Please also make sure that you can see the following settings in the Moon config file (could be either Config\Moon.cfg, Config\ProjectApollo\Moon.cfg, Config\AMSO\Moon.cfg or any other, depending on the scenario):
      
  ElevationResolution = 0.5
  MaxPatchResolution = 18
      
    
Additionally, in D3D9Client Advanced Setup increasing Mesh Resolution to 64 could further improve the visuals. The screenshots with the same camera positions as before are showing a significant improvement:
West Crater and LM5, looking to west West Crater and LM5, looking to north-west Close to LM5 you can see the reflected sunlight on the real descent stage. Bit farther on the right side the faint circle is the Little West Crater.

Last modified: Dec 23rd, 2022