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.