Unlike Galileo’s topographic artistry, Selenographia was a first attempt at organized lunar cartography.
Just 37 years after Galileo published his drawings of the Moon, Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius released his book Selenographia (Pictures of the Moon). Galileo’s sketches were topographic, creating a three-dimensional representation of the Moon that showed how its features varied in height. Thus, Harriot’s maps are two-dimensional and tried to capture the physical and spatial relationships of lunar features. This phenomenon means that over the course of one libration cycle, roughly 18 percent of the lunar farside can be seen creeping around the Moon’s limb. Harriot was interested in the spatial relationships of lunar features, in part to understand the wobble, or libration, of the Moon. It’s important here to understand the difference between cartography and topography. This upended the wisdom of Aristotle from 2,000 years before, which held the Moon was in the realm of perfection and that there would be nothing to map! He realized that the interplay of light and shadow across the Moon indicated a rugged surface, which he captured in his drawings. Galileo burst onto the scene in March 1610 with the publication of his Sidereus Nuncius, or Starry Messenger. Within a few years, Harriot had drawn maps with more details, including the dark seas and prominent craters displayed in correct proportion to each other. He produced the earliest datable map of the Moon on July 26, 1609, though he never published it. In England, Thomas Harriot was one of the first to seriously observe the Moon with such an instrument. The telescope was first sold for military and mercantile purposes, but people soon turned it skyward. In 1608, news spread quickly through Europe of a new instrument that made distant objects appear closer. However, these depictions of the Moon’s surface are not the same as maps. Europeans would refer to these features as the man in the Moon, the Cowichan First Nation peoples in Canada’s Pacific Northwest see a toad, and the image of a rabbit is preferred in Asia - to name a few examples. The most obvious features visible without optical aid are the vast dark areas known as maria, or seas, which are bordered by lighter areas. What they imagined they saw on its surface had a great deal to do with cultural context.
Yellow moon atlas full#
The rising of a bright Full Moon has inspired poets, songwriters, and torytellers. This was a culmination of work begun nearly 400 years earlier, when Thomas Harriot, Galileo Galilei, and others first turned their telescopes on the Moon, revealing a world of wonder and surprise. Not since the early age of global exploration had maps been so important to the success and survival of adventurers. Those years of planning and cartography had resulted in a fantastic achievement. When Armstrong radioed, “The Eagle has landed,” pandemonium broke out in Mission Control. But the familiarity with the terrain he had acquired from training - including simulations using maps of the landing site - paid off.
Yellow moon atlas manual#
Neil Armstrong was forced to take manual control to dodge boulders that could not have been detected by prior observations. The site for the July 20, 1969, landing had been carefully chosen, informed by years of careful observation and mapping of the Moon’s surface. Likewise, km^2 refers to the object's height and width.When the Apollo 11 Lunar Module was running low on fuel and getting too close to the lunar surface to abort, alarms began to light up in Mission Control. It refers to the object's size, height, width and depth. The orbital eccentricity is 0.0012, the degree at which Atlas orbits close to a circular (0) orbit as opposed to an elliptical (1).Īs someone asked me to clarify what km^3 means, it means Kilometers Cubed, i.e. The orbital inclination, the angle at which Atlas orbits to the orbital plane, is 0.3 degrees.
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