Some Aspects of Multilingual Planetary Map Producing for Non- Professional Audience: Visualization and Nomenclature

In general, maps should answer a very simple question of its reader: "what's there" and „where is something”? For planetary maps, the answer is more difficult, because (1) in some cases even map makers don't know what's there, since the main original source data is images of the surface (2) its readers are not familiar with the surface forms (3) the official Latin IAU names appearing on the map provide little guidance. Most planetary maps made for the general public are photoor pixel based, not vectorial cartographic products. This would require different working methods but, would provide more understandable (and, necessarily, [pre-] interpreted) maps. In the paper give details/answers of above mentioned problems, mainly from the experience of the editing of the map of Mars, Venus and the Moon in the Central European Edition of the Multilingual Planetary Maps series initiated by MIIGAiK (Moscow) and supported by the ICA Commission on Planetary Cartography and by the Hungarian Space Office; and of the planetary maps of the World Atlas published by Topográf Ltd, Hungary. We have conducted a detailed survey of the maps of the Moon and Mars using the same bas maps but different nomenclatures: one with translated generic forms and an other with the Latin forms and we examined how the interpretation and understandability has changed using the two different maps. We also surveyed what the map readers missed from the maps and what elements they could not interpret. The goal of our research is to find elements with which we can make planetary maps with a richer information content that can be easily decoded by the users. INTRODUCTION A considerable part of all published Planetary maps are produced for non-professional audience. The mapunderstanding and map-interpretation of the general public is usually not very good even for tourist maps, and this is also the case for planetary maps, where they find even less information that can be easy to decode (understand): even thought the information are there, for the map readers they are undecipherable. We have produced several wall-, world atlasand online planetary maps for non professional audience. Using these maps we have initiated a survey among amateur astronomers, university and high school students, asking them about what they understood form the different test maps. Part of the result are presented in this paper, which tells that planetary maps need a special attention in both nomenclature and its visual representations in order to make it more easily and effectively interpreted or decoded by the those who are not familiar with terrestrial planetary surface features. Prerequisites for creating a new generation of planetary maps for general (non scientific) use. (1) There is a need for a clear guide or database of the landform types of the Solar System. This is a prerequisite for all maps, since for the generalization and symbols used in the map, we must previously know what groups and types of features will appear on the map. Such database should contain landforms listed by their geology, morphology and IAU names. There is also need for a catalogue of the historic (or diachronic) terminology in planetary science: during the decades the terms applied for certain features changed, or the same name is used differently. (2) The readers find a completely alien world on the map. Many of the surface forms has no Earth parallels, thus we can't have experience to imagine them. The used symbols and the generalization should help readers properly identify the features. Since such landforms don't appear on Earth maps, we have to find new symbols for them. A map readable for the „general user” should contain geologic, stratigraphic, albedo, morphologic and topographic and historic (landings) information to make the map better interpretable and understandable. Most maps are very small scale maps. This can only show a limited variety of features, however, the most „interesting” features are of relatively small size. Here carefully selected cutouts and/or generalization can help to highlight the location of these landforms (in the case of Mars: landslides, layered crater deposits, DDS’s, small valleys, calderas etc). (3) Names of extraterrestrial features have almost the same historic complexity as terrestrial ones. „Planetary nomenclature, like terrestrial nomenclature, is used to uniquely identify a feature on the surface of a planet or satellite so that the feature can be easily located, described, and discussed.” (Gazetteer... 1, 2003) While this goal is achieved in scientific discussions, for public education or popular science the present day international form of planetary names is not suitable. The IAU nomenclature is in Latin language which is not understandable for large part of the map readers. Most editors and popular writers do use a national language variant of these names (in books, articles, Atlases). Since there is no standardized national transformation rule for guiding this effort, they try their best, and this way produce multiple translated /transcribed /transliterated variants for the same feature name. (N.B. The translation may seem unnecessary for the reader who understand a Indo-European language, since even though the names are not the same words as the ones in their language, they are familiar and relatively easy to find out their meaning [Mons Mount or Planitia Plains]. This is not the case for several other European and most of not European languages, where the Latin names are meaningless.) In the case of maps for non-professional or young audience, I propose to some extent in contrast to the UNGEN (United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names) efforts on a single standardization of geographical names to use standardized national language variants of the Latin terminology, with which it would be much easier (or, this