Hi, I fined some free good Hi-Res textures maps, of Earth, Moon, Mars, Venus..... 
Maybe someone know this, maybe not.... 

free maps, with res: 2500x1250
http://www.oera.net/How2/TextureMaps.htm

some another link, with res 2048X1024
http://www.orbithangar.com/searchauth.php?search=markl316
*some maps can be with higher resulution (if I don't find them on another web. I don't remember :) )

Thankyou very much. Very useful. :)

Woah! Thanks!   The Mars one has my HAB on it too !!!!!

Hello,

Thank you for the link.
I have found another which has some other planets and satellites... the author says that they are free for personal noncomercial use (GPL).

http://laps.noaa.gov/albers/sos/sos.html

Also, this one has even a map of Pluto, derived from the Hubble Space Telescope Observations.

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/spaceart/cylmaps.html

Best regards

Ramon

Interesting fined all maps of our solar system... I don't think, is realy. but the  most of them, maybe ......  this can be graet! :)

Yes, I think that some of them are not real; for example, there are some maps that show the earth during the ice age; or Mars with oceans (we can ask The Bryster :-D). But there are others that are based on the images taken by the space probes or the Hubble Space Telescope. In some case the author has made changes, such as painting small zones of the image...

Ramon

I have found ahother page with planet and satellite maps, based on the photos taken bu space probes. The author, Bjorn Jonsson, gives permission to use them. You can find them here:

Although paleo-climate maps are at best guesses based on someone's interpretation of what evidence is available to say they are not real is academic - it gives us something to think about either way. 

btw here's something I ran across on utube which I thought was interesting too: 

http://youtube.com/watch?v=JX3VmDgiFnY

Thanks for the links -  I'm pretty sure I've seen them before but the sites I recall these (or similar) files were on went down  a long while ago.

Did someone mention this site yet?  (Some highres planet textures included on the Carrara content CD too)

http://planetpixelemporium.com/

Here's an example of some of these textures used in 2D painting program Project Dogwaffle with the Spherize tool:

http://thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/tuts/spherize/index.html

-Philip
thebest3d.com - beyond digital painting

Here is another resources that has huge maps of almost every object of the solar system (including Venus moons), for free.

http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/show_creator_details.php?creator_id=10

Some maps are truly huge (4000*2000 pixels and more)

Note that there are individual pages for each planet, everything is not on this page.

what means the levels, and parts of them, in the planets ?

P.S. 
I about the link of offrench

The way I see it the level is how much resolution (larger number more detail)
and the parts are likely just that ... ie seperate maps for terrain, clouds etc.

As with any of these sites, most will post copyright and/or vague legal claims/disclaimers concerning the images hosted, and typically point out that it's your responsibility to find out from the original owner about their policies.

Flat out: do your homework and...... "CYA" - (cover your assets)

Please Read Renderosity's  Copyright Policy

Those maps are normally intended for a 3d Space Simulator Celestia. I think the normal maps and their levels can only be used within it, but never tried them.
The legal info about the files is here

Venus has moons? I missed this in astronomy class...but that was almost 30 years ago...;)

pakled:
I wanted to  take a course in Astronomy once but at the time I didn't have the calculus requirement. 

ICM
Yeah it is questionable who actually owns the stuff  I viewed sequitor to this thread as a lot of it seems modified in some manner, but the ones I saw years ago were unquestionably based on N.A.S.A. data and the copyright question was less entangled.  Personally, I don't see a use for any of it other than as a tool to learn projection of a bitmap to a sphere but the math of how to do it is in the back of my old trig book something like given the polar coordinates (r,theta):  x = r cos theta and y = r sin theta.(which as I recall from my C++ programming days, actually works!!!)  

also the thing I was looking at on utube (Posted this thread Tue, Nov 27, 2007 5:31 pm) might be fun playing with ... not sure Bryce handles light well enough to do it though. let's see (thinking) Bryce is on my w2000 computer now ... hmm no I'm too comfortable in my un-comfy chair right now to go into the other room to try it out (besides I don't want to stop time ... or do I?) (/thinking) 
... but if someone else wants to try it out I would be interested in their results.(is that being lazy or what?)