Thanks everyone , it works now. It was clear as day, but just learning the java /android stuff and was using an example snippet. It was actually scaling down my image to 64x64. Should have known by the name of the function "rescale" what it was doing, just thinking it may have been a limitation of the 3d textures which so far seems to just be the powers of 2 one which is fine. It looks great in 1024x1024 now
Texture periodic_table = new Texture( BitmapHelper.rescale(BitmapHelper.convert(getResources().getDrawable(R.drawable.periodictable)), 64, 64) );