Objectives  Enhancing people's cognition of the planetary topography becomes an important task of planetary exploration. People living on the Earth have formed visual experiences and spatial cognition based on the Earth environment. It is a challenge to recognize and identify the landforms and phenomena of other planets. With the analysis of the different cognition of the topography between the Moon and the Earth, the enhanced visualization of the moon topography based on the earth cognitive transfer can make us more intuitively understand lunar cartography.

  Methods  We compare the similarities and the differences in topography and color system between the Moon and the Earth to build the cognition transferring from the Earth view to the Moon view, constructs visualization requirements with its similarities and differences between the Moon and the Earth.

  Results  We formulate a scheme to enhance the visualization of the moon's topography according to people's existing cognition habits of the Earth's geomorphology, and take the lunar typical landforms, including the crater, the mares, the highlands and the riles, and lunar regional topography as examples to shade with different shading parameters (altitudinal angle and azimuth angle) and get corresponding shading effects.

  Conclusions  We discover the visualization similarities and the differences between the Earth and the Moon with cognition transferring, and discover the enhanced moon visualization should utilize the similarities to meet our rapid visual thinking and break certain particular rules of the earth topographic visualization (like snow line) to illustrate lunar terrain characteristics.