I'm not sure about automatically, but there is software out there that will do it. I would hazard a guess that if you crop out the two hemispheres that you could do the warp with something like Hugin or one of the other reprojection packages out there. http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...reprojectimage also looks like a viable technique.

I'm partial to my ancient ReprojectImage software as described in the above thread. The 10 minute conversion looks like:

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I didn't put too much time into aligning things or trying to get exact sizes, though, so things are a little out of whack at the poles.