Abstract
The lunar topography constitutes a subject whose emergence and subsequent evolution can be traced with relative precision : for its sources go back to the very first days of telescopic astronomy inaugurated by Galileo Galilei in 1609. Although Galileo was not the real inventor of the telescope, he was indubitably the first to use it for observations of celestial bodies; and as he recorded a year later in his Nuntius Sidereus, “. . . Sed missis terrenis ad coelestium speculationes me contuli: ac Lunam prius tarn ex propinquo sum intuitus, ac si vix per duas Telluris diametros abesset”*; and further (on p. 13) he continued that “. . . De facie autem Lunae, quae ad aspectum nostrum vergit primo loco dicamus; quam facillionis intelligentiae gratia in duas partes distinguo, alteram nempe clariorem, obscuriorem alteram. . . ut certo intelligamus, Lunae superficiem non perpolitam, acquabilem, exactissimaeque sphaericitatis exsistere, ut magna Philosophorum cohors de ipsa deque reliquis corporibus coelesti-bus opinata est, sed contra inaequalem, asperam, caritatibus tumoribus confertam, non secus ac ipsiusmet Telluris faciem, quae montium ignis vallumque profunditatibus hic inde distinguitur”.**
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Bibliographical Notes
Several recent historians of science (e.g., Houzeau in his Vade-Mecum de l’astronome; or Wolf in Handbuch der Astronomie, ihrer Geschichte und Literatur) referred to the existence of drawings of the lunar surface in the volume De Phenomenis in Orbe Lunae, etc. by Iulio Caesare La Galla (Venice 1612) which would be second in age only to those of Galileo. In actual fact, however, none of the copies of La Galla’s book preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris contains any lunar maps; nor do the copies extant in the National Library of Florence. However, according to Maffei (1962), the copy in possession of the National Library of Rome contains drawings of the Moon attributed to La Galla — but these prove to be identical with those published previously by Galileo in his Nuntius Sidereus! The presumed drawings by La Galla are, therefore, in reality those of Galileo.
The same conclusion has been arrived at also by Emanuelli (private information) who pointed out that the publisher of La Galla’s work was the same Tommaso Baglioni, in Venice, who published Galileo’s Nuncius two years before. It is, therefore, probable that the lunar drawings (obviously Galileo’s) were inserted in at least a part of the edition of La Galla’s book (otherwise lacking any illustrations altogether) by the publisher himself, perhaps in order to increase its attractiveness for the reader.
Of other contemporary drawings of the Moon, those of Malapert — based on the observations made on November 29, 1619, and brought to light in 1910 by P. Bosmans — are in no way superior to the previous work of Galileo or Scheiner.
The lunar maps reproduced in Riccioli’s Almagestum Novum were not the actual work of the author of that book, but rather of his Jesuit confrère P. Francesco Grimaldi. Note the delightful inscription on the top of his “Figure pro nomenclatura et libratione lunare”, reproduced on our Figure 15–11 : “Nec homines Lunam incolunt, nec Anime in Lunam migrant” — an observation in which Riccioli was well ahead of many of his successors.
For earlier histories of lunar mapping cf., e.g., Kopal (1962) and Maffei (1962).
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© 1966 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Kopal, Z. (1966). Mapping of the Moon. In: An Introduction to the Study of the Moon. Astrophysics and Space Science Library. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-6320-2_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-6320-2_15
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