Many people are aware of the utility of WinJUPOS in planetary imaging, and a growing number are now aware that it can also be used to create remarkably accurate maps of the Moon using amateur images, as has been showcased in previous threads by several users. For those interested in this topic, I wanted to draw attention to a very quick and easy way to accurately align the WinJUPOS reference frame to any lunar image, no matter how small the ROI, or when it was taken. When you select "Moon" as the object in WinJUPOS and then click on "Recording" and "Image Measurement", you then open your image and select the appropriate time, date, and location. The exact time and location are very important because they determine the perspective view of the Moon.
This is the point at which most people would just resize the reference frame until it fits around the limb of the Moon and the terminator, assuming you have a full disk image of the Moon. However, getting a very precise alignment is not as easy as you might think, because the outline provided of the Moon and terminator just represents the mean lines assuming the Moon was a smooth sphere, which it is not. In particular, the lunar limb is not smooth, and some mountains stick up in relief. Do you include those within the reference frame, or not? Similarly, the terminator line is just a theoretical line dependent only on the sub-solar point, but the "real" terminator that divides lunar day from night is dependent on topography and is not straight. So, where you do place the reference line? Also, if you have an image that just represents a small region of the Moon, how do you align the reference? You can use a resized NASA simulated image and then place your image over it and load that into WinJUPOS, but this has two problems. The first is that it adds the extra step of having to align your image to the NASA simulation, and this has its own amount of inaccuracy. The second is that you are limited to time periods in which you can generate a suitable simulated image, and even then you can only get within an hour of time accuracy. Needless to say, doing this repeatedly with many images quickly becomes tedious.
There is a common solution to all of the above issues, and that simply involves selecting the option of "Adjustment according to two known points". Below I will provide a few examples of what I am talking about. Because each post can only contain 500kb of images, I will have to post this in succession. Also, this entire post is based on the assumption that one is interested in creating a map that has very accurate latitude and longitude coordinates. Why would you want to do this? Mostly just for fun and the challenge, much like anything else in solar system imaging. If your only goal is to create a projection that looks nice, you don't need a very accurate reference frame.
The starting point for this example is the cropped image below. I wanted to use an example that did not contain the lunar limb. This image does contain the terminator, which illustrates my earlier point of how you would be hard pressed to decide exactly where to place the terminator reference line based on the image. But the method shown below doesn't require any terminator regions either. You could use an image of a single crater from anywhere on the lunar surface.
