I'm trying to render the moon, to scale. The USGS provide a detailed
topographic map of the moon in the form of about 270000 points in the
form of latitude, longitude and radius tuples. Are there any cunning
tricks I can use that will help me render this?

Right now I've got a little program that will convert it to xyz tuples,
and then I run the result through tetgen to produce a quad mesh, and
then I run it through yet another little program to produce a Povray
mesh2 object. The results are rather unsatisfactory --- it's slow (the
file takes about a minute just to parse!), some of the polygons don't
meet exactly at the edges, and the crude conversion I'm doing from quads
to triangles isn't helping with the shading.

I would think that it should be possible to use a parametric surface for
this, but I'd need a way to somehow get it to interpolate between the
data points in the topographic model --- any suggestions?

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