Before the invention of the telescope, very few artists had bothered to portray the Moon reliably. In medieval manuscripts and stained glass, the Moon often appears with a human face. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) made some detailed sketches of the moonspots visible to the naked eye, but it was probably Jan van Eyck who was able to more accurately and naturally capture the lunar terminator in The Crucifixion . The Englishman Willian Gilbert made shortly before his death in 1603 a drawing of the Moon as seen with the naked eye which will appear in De Mundo Nostro Sublunari . It is the first known lunar map and some seas can be recognized on it. It was Gilbert who coined the term selenography to refer to the description of lunar formations.
The invention of the telescope made it possible to add much more detail. The first to direct a telescope to the Moon was the Englishman Thomas Harriot (1560-1621), who in July 1609 made some very detailed drawings of our satellite with a telescope of only six magnifications, these pioneering drawings were never published and they had no impact. The first observations that did have an echo in the society of his time were those made by Galileo Galilei in his work Sidereus Nuncius , made four months after those of Harriot. Galileo’s drawings, however, are a schematic view of what he saw with the telescope: the formations recorded in them do not correspond reliably to the real features of the Moon.
The first lunar observers
After the sensational publication of Galileo, various astronomers set out to draw the Moon as seen through a telescope, it is the birth of selenography . The quality of lunar maps progresses in line with the advancement of instruments. Between 1610 and 1650, numerous maps were published, including those by Christoph Scheiner, known for his controversy with Galileo about sunspots; Michael van Langren, who drew a lunar map with the idea of solving the problem of determining latitude on the high seas; French astronomer Pierre Gassendi; the Italian lawyer Francesco Fontana or the Czech Capuchin Anton Maria Schyrleus de Rheita.
Around 1640, the Polish brewer Johannes Hevelius established a private observatory, called the Stellaburgum , which would be the envy of European royalty. The observatory, in addition to innumerable instruments, sextants and quadrants, had its own optical workshop and a printing press. This unusual deployment of means for the time gave Hevelius the necessary freedom to carry out unprecedented astronomical work. With a 46-meter-long telescope, he recorded the visible formations in the different lunar phases. His work Selenographia sive Lunae Descriptio , published in 1647, is a splendid book on the Moon that he not only paid for out of his own pocket because, in addition to being an author, he was also an editor and engraver.
He published a good number of copies and the work was widely distributed. In 40 sheets he collected the different lunar phases engraved on copper by himself and in three main maps of about 29 centimeters in diameter he showed the nomenclature of the formations. After Langren’s, it was the second great map in the history of lunar cartography. Hevelius’ moon phase prints became the standard work for almost a century. It contained nearly 500 pages of explanations, as well as a glossary of 275 named lunar formations. In addition, engravings of the telescopes he used appear in the work, offering invaluable information on the technology of his time. Hevelius considered that the Moon was a world similar to ours , to the point of being convinced of the existence of lunar inhabitants, whom he baptized as “selenites”. The formations of his lunar map follow the geography of the classical world, with names such as the Mediterranean Sea, Adriatic Sea, Black Sea or Caspian Sea. In the center of his Mediterranean Sea he placed Sicily, which appears as a large volcanic island with Mount Etna at its center, a formation that corresponds to the crater now known as Copernicus. The chronicles say that when Pope Innocent X saw the map he lamented that it was the work of a heretic. Indeed, Hevelius was a Protestant.
Selenography becomes science
In 1651, another map of great importance for posterity is published. It is the work of a Jesuit from Ferrara, Father Giovanni Battista Riccioli. In his great work Almagestum Novum , published in Bologna, he includes two lunar maps. One of them shows the effects of the lunar libration, the swaying of the satellite both in longitude and latitude that allow us to see more than half of the surface of our satellite. The most interesting thing is that the map includes the names of the seas, mountains and craters that we are still using today. Names as familiar as the Sea of Tranquility or the Sea of Serenity we owe to Riccioli’s inventiveness.
After this first stage, which covers some four decades after the invention of the telescope, there is a long period of inactivity until the beginning of the 19th century . The most noteworthy works at this stage are the large lunar map made by Giovanni Domenico Cassini at the newly established Paris Observatory and the detailed pastels on blue cardboard made in Nuremberg by the astronomer Maria Clara Eimmart (1676-1707). His detailed series of drawings of telescopic observations of the phases of the Moon—250 in all—occupies a place of honor in lunar cartography.
In the early 19th century, observers used large achromatic refractors and micrometers to study and map the Moon. It is the age of scientific cartography. The maps made by Wilhelm Beer, banker and amateur astronomer, and the astronomer Johann Heinrich Mädler stand out. Beer had a private observatory in his Berlin villa with a magnificent 9.4 cm aperture telescope made by Joseph von Fraunhofer. The instrument was equipped with a micrometer and with this instrument Mädler measured the positions of 105 reference points with great precision. The resulting map, 97.5 cm in diameter, was published in four sections under the title Mappa Selenographica totam Lunae hemisphaeram visibilem complectens (Berlin, 1834-1836).
The camera attached to the telescope
One of the best lunar maps of the 19th century was the work of the German astronomer Johann Friedrich Julius Schmidt who compiled his observations made over 32 years in various cities in the monumental Charte der Gebirge des Mondes . Schmidt became so fascinated with a lunar map at the age of 14 that he dedicated his life to drawing the most detailed map of the world. Schmidt was an obsessive observer, probably no astronomer in history has spent so much time studying the Moon. In fact, he is one of the astronomers featured in Around the Moon , Jules Verne’s famous novel. With Germanic meticulousness, he set about capturing more craters, crevasses, and mountains on his own map in more detail than anyone else had done before.
In 1838, Louis Daguerre took the first photograph of the Moon , this pioneering image would lay the foundations for the third great stage in the history of selenography. A period that begins in 1890 with the systematic recording of the Moon by photographic means. The first director of the Lick Observatory, Edward S. Holden, used the magnificent 17.34 meter focal length refractor to photograph the Moon. The result appeared in the Lick Observatory Atlas of the Moon , published between 1896 and 1897. For their part, Maurice Lœwy and Pierre Puiseux published between 1896 and 1910 the Atlas Photographique de la Lune made from some ten thousand photographs taken at the Observatory of Paris with a great equatorial of 18 meters of focal length. After this work and its various editions that were the reference in the first half of the 20th century, it is worth mentioning the Photographic Atlas of the Moon by William Henry Pickering. The last great photographic map is the work of the Dutch astronomer Gerard P. Kuiper with several collaborators, the Photographic Lunar Atlas , which shows 44 lunar regions photographed under different lighting conditions from the sun.
In 1919, the International Astronomical Union undertakes the task of rationalizing the lunar nomenclature. During the 1920s and early 1930s, various maps were reviewed and analyzed, a complex process that culminated in the publication of Named Lunar Formations in 1935, a catalog that included the names of more than six thousand formations.
the moon from space
In 1959, the Soviet Luna 3 spacecraft transmitted images of the far side of the Moon , providing the first ever photographs of lunar regions that are beyond the reach of ground-based telescopes. In 1967, Atlas Obratnoi Storony Luny ( Atlas of the Reverse of the Moon ) is published in the Soviet Union. The images were of very poor quality and almost half of the names were Russian. When the USSR delegation presented its nomenclature of the Moon, it was met with opposition from the United States National Committee for Lunar Nomenclature and Cartography. The Americans suggested that only the 450 formations recorded on the occult chart of the Moon be assigned numbers. Years later, the Soviet Lunokhod 1 and 2 missions (1970-73) covered almost 50 km of the lunar surface, taking detailed photographs.
For its part, the United States of America launched the Ranger spacecraft between 1961 and 1965 to photograph the lunar surface up to the moment they impacted it. Other space mapping programs included Lunar Orbiter, active between 1966 and 1967, to photograph the Moon from orbit to find potential landing sites, and Surveyor, between 1966 and 1968, to photograph and soft-land on the lunar surface. In 1971, NASA published the Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Moon which included 675 images taken by the Lunar Orbiter program satellites between 1966 and 1967.
The Clementine spacecraft , launched in 1994, obtained the first near-global mapping of the lunar topography, as well as multispectral images. In 2007, the Japanese Kaguya probe carried out the most ambitious lunar exploration mission after the Apollo missions, in addition to numerous scientific instruments it carried a high-resolution television camera that has given us breathtaking images of the lunar landscape and that we can now enjoy in Youtube.
