Lunar Crater Catalogue - LCC 1.0

In addition to craters and satellite craters, the first version of LCC lists other surface features of our Moon, including mare, mountains, mountain ranges, grooves, and a few others.

At the moment there are 8,967 entries including several names, position and size information, as well as dependencies.

The catalog can be downloaded as an SQL import file and in the form of Povray arrays.

Source of data

The only source of data so far are two text files that Jonathan C. McDowell has deposited on his private website and that I am allowed to publish prepared with his consent.

https://www.planet4589.org/astro/lunar/

According to his statement, the data originally came from the USGS. I couldn't find a database or table on their pages, but for the sake of completeness it should also be mentioned.
https://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/

As far as the total number of inputs is concerned, all surface features larger than 10 kilometers are likely to be included, perhaps even down to one kilometer.

One decimal place for positions (latitude and longitude) at 10,920 kilometres of lunar circumference results in an accuracy of 3 kilometres. This is not important for large surface features, but in the case of small satellite craters, there is a visible deviation from the crater center.

Modifications for LCC

The text files Craters and Features of the source website were combined, converted (special characters), converted into an SQL table and then extended by columns.

I have corrected errors in the name column name_real and created more from the result:
name_ascii, name_uri, name_short, name_tiny

Crater dependencies were derived from the existing data:
num_sats, is_sat, parent_id, parent_ascii

Columns + content

id	ID, ascending
name_real	Name with special chars
name_ascii	Name without special chars
name_uri	Lower letters, ascii, without spaces
name_short	Abbreviation of 3 letters + satellite crater postfix
name_tiny	Satellite crater postfix only
type	Type of the entry (Crater, Mare, ...)
size	Size or dimension
lat_d	Latitude in degree (-90 to + 90)
lon_d	Longitude in degree (-180 to +180)
lat_o	Latitude in degree + direction (0 to 90, N = north, S = south)
lon_o	Longitude in degree + direction (0 to 180, E = east, W = west)
num_sats	In case of main crater number of satellite craters
is_sat	Main crater = 0 and satellite crater = 1
parent_id	ID main crater
parent_ascii	Name main crater
side_*	On which side of the moon visible, see below
first_desc	First description, see list
first_nom	First nomenclature citation, see list

Note
Column id is an ascending number, not a unique crater ID, it may change in a new version.

Column descriptions

name_*

name_real is the only column that contains special characters (e.g. Abul Wáfa). All others consist only of ASCII characters, special characters have been converted (á, à, â, ã, ā => a), German umlauts separately (ä => ae). I created the catalog primarily for use with the Povray scripting language, which suffers from a certain special character intolerance. This column is not included in the Povray array for now.

name_ascii is used to link main and satellite craters.
name_short and name_tiny are helpful with regard to satellite craters. Short contains the first 3 characters of the name + the satellite crater postfix, e.g. Cop A for the first satellite crater of Copernicus. Tiny contains only the postfix, so it is empty for main craters.

type

Apart from craters, other surface features are also included in the catalog.
The number of entries per type can be determined with the following SQL statement.

SELECT type, count(*) FROM lcc_10 GROUP BY type ORDER BY count(*) DESC	

Among them are 8642 craters, 22 mare, 59 rimae, 35 mons, and a dozen more.
63 entries are designated as Crater (A). These are mini-craters, some without official names, which were named during Apollo missions for orientation.

side_*

The side_* columns indicate on which side of the Moon the crater is located. Specifications for front, back, west, east, north, south respectively, so that specific craters of one side can be selected without error-prone calculations with Latitude and Longitude.
Column site_fbwens summarizes all six information in one string. Value "101010" represents a crater that can be seen on the front side (earth faced), west side, and from the north.

Small flaws

A handful of craters are recorded with a diameter of 0. These are either incorrect entries, or the number is below the accuracy for the information.

Conceivable extensions

There is another data source for lunar craters, which contains fewer columns, e.g. no type information such as craters and mares, and does not list some types at all, but offers one more decimal place for position information and size. A more accurate version could be created from the combination of both sources.

An integrated list of all landing sites would be nice, from Apollo to the latest mini-landers, some of which even landed upright.

I skipped both tasks for the first version. Especially the addendum of all landing sites would be an estimated 10 to 20 hours of search and manual work. Lists found so far have been incomplete or in a format that cannot be easily imported. Examples of the latter are various HTML tables on Wikipedia.

Download

Current version is LCC 1.0 or lcc_10 from January 2026.

SQL

The SQL import file is optimized for MySQL or Maria-DB. It contains a drop-table statement, the table name is lcc_10, a database is not created. Imported, the table is 2 MB in size.
Indexes are created for the following columns: id, name_ascii, parent_ascii, parent_id.

The file was exported using the PHP database tool Adminer 5.4.1 and successfully imported.

SQL-Download
⬇ dbmoon_lcc_10_sql_complete.sql => 1,5 MB

Povray

The text file can be included in Povray and contains a string array with all the necessary information. Integer or float variables must be converted before use, as Povray does not allow arrays with different data types (string, integer, float) in version 3.7. Povray does also not like special characters, so the column name_real is not included in the array, name_ascii serves as a replacement.
Columns that are not needed for display have been omitted: name_uri, lon_o, lat_o, first_desc, first_nom.
Of the columns side_*, only side_fbwens is included.

What the array file looks like can be seen in a mini-example.

Povray-Download
⬇ dbmoon_lcc_10_pov_all.inc => 1,3 MB

Example images

Rendered with Povray, more are in the works.