How to make sphere textures not to distort.

Hi.
I have a problem. How can I make textures that doesn´t distort at the poles of the sphere ?  There comes such textures with max (moonrock). Is there a program or method to achieve this ?  ???

there is a mapping operation in max 5 that will alow you to use spherical mapping :)  Just look it up in the user reference under
"spherical Mapping" (correct my spelling error first of course!!)