Thats alot of work, good job!
Its possible, but its more likely processing the raw data using a different technique that causes the differences. Cant be sure, but yeah this looks alot better now. I didnt add any noise myself, since i dont know how to/hadnt considered it, when i felt it looked a little flat i just went looking for a better topo map.
So i looked in the blend file, and it seems i changed the texture map to this one at some point: https://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc/view_rdr_product/WAC_GLD100_E000N1800_064P
That one was better, and i also recall manually aligning the color map from the other Nasa site i linked before, just used photoshop offset the color map horizontally, sorry i was learning alot and didnt yet have a proper folder structure going, its also likely i made othe changes to the textures but i was moving fast and eager to get back to blender, i could likely send you the blend file along with those texures though, if you let me know an easy way to share it.
Ooh nice, i may have used a higher res texture, or could be more subdivisions, this is very close though!
Didnt do anything specific in that regard, its a just a standard UV sphere with a (2:1) texture map. I did run in to that issue when trying to export (bake) a procedural gas planet texture map, but its pretty trivial to fix the texture map in photoshop afterwards. This is just an entry level project i did to learn the basics of blender, after 25 years of using 3DsMax only. Took a good while to render on my new pc so i thought i should share it before deleting it localy.
Test render from a very simple blender animation i am working on as early blender learning project.
Feel free to use as you please. Textures courtesy NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio
Render and texture edits by me, made with Blender.
Oh thats a tough one, i dont like it but ive seen a major community divided over it before. It comes down to not the art but the size of the furry community, they are more prolific in general, so theres alot more of it, but the genre is not really understood by the general art community, which is comparitivley smaller in terms of posting. So we decided against it here, to keep moderating easy, and since there are likely already other dedicated communities for that anyway. I hope that makes some degree of sense. I dont mind linking a good furry community on the side bar near that rule if you would like to suggest one though.