3D view of the moon from a flat image

[Asellus]

Last year I had a go tilting images of craters near the edge of the limb to get a simulated top down perspective. I realised that if you had a full disc image you should be able to map that on to a 3D solid hemisphere and then rotate that hemisphere to get a top down view anywhere on this side of the moon. Below is my attempt to do this using blender (a 3D modelling and animation tool). Original "flat" image is a mosaic using a 12" Orion Optics UK newtonian at about f26 and an ASI294mc processed in AS!3, RegStakx, GIMP. 3D projection and animation done in blender. The original image had a very favourable eastern libration that allowed you to see to about 90 degrees east. Worked pretty well so going to have a go at a few more of these!

https://youtu.be/A_6UvuSUYSY

Searching around the web, I am by no means the first person to do this. The earliest I found were workers at the University of Arizona in the early '60s working on the "Rectified lunar atlas" who projected photographic images down a long dark tunnel onto a 3ft diameter sphere. They then stood at the side of the sphere to photograph the limb top-down. https://www.psi.edu/epo/multiring_impact_basins/multiring_impact_basins.html

There was also this post on SGL from a few years back using the Lunar Terminator Visualisation tool to get single top-down images near the limb: