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The First Moon Map, and Not By Galileo
sergio80 writes in with a timely piece of history in this the International Year of Astronomy, celebrating the 400th anniversary of the invention of the telescope. "Galileo Galilei is often credited with being the first person to look through a telescope and make drawings of the celestial objects he observed. While the Italian indeed was a pioneer in this realm, he was not the first..." That honor belongs to Thomas Harriot, an Englishman, who bought his first "Dutch trunke" (i.e. telescope) shortly after its invention in the Netherlands and made a sketch of the moon as seen through it in July of 1609.
This article was on the Firehose, what... 400 years ago?
Who is this Lord Egremont who apparently owns the copyright to the photographs(?) of the drawings? Surely the original drawings aren't under copyright?
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/14/1812232
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Pretty bad drawing. You could probably do a better job if you were a good artist, without any kind of optical device. Galileo gets the credit because his drawings actually looked good.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Careful, AC links to shock site.
printf($randomline(sigs.txt) \n "-- "$randomline(authors.txt));
-- myself
Well, the viewer is technically "moon"ed as well.
Yes, worth repeating: shock site, do not see.
Not a chance, Harriot cannot be a hero of science since he did not publish his work. If you don't actually take the risk of publishing and try to contribute your knowledge to the world then you are not a hero of science.
Therefore this is all a bit of special pleading. This guy basically bought a telescope and drew a few pictures. Galileo made a telescope and changed the way we looked at the world.
Disclaimer: I'm British, I revere Newton, but Galileo is the one I really look up to.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
July 1609 ... and three hundred and sixty years later, humans walked on its surface.
If you look closely at the edges of this map it says: "here be Whalers"
I didn't see the brown rope. I looked and looked but could not find it. Please link to a brown rope next time.
Drooling Nationalists hoping to feel better about themselves by convincing the rest of the world that some guy who once lived in the same area of the Earth's surface that they do was "first".
wait what? the moon is *NOT* flat? WoW
Harriot went on to produce more maps from 1610 to 1613, ... By 1613 he had created two maps of the whole moon, with many identifiable features such as lunar craters that crucially are depicted in their correct relative positions.
Last I checked, the moon is tidally locked with the earth, meaning its orbit about equals its rotation and so we always see the same hemisphere of the moon, even from other places on the earth.
So if this guy made the first map of the "whole moon" he must have also invented space travel or received a drawing from Mars. I'm sure what they meant to say was "full map of the moon as visible from earth", but lets keep the detail level reasonable.
The far side of the Moon was not seen in its entirety until 1959, when photographs were transmitted from the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3.
ya, that.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Does the sky not bend the light as we look towards the heavens? Is the atmosphere not a lens, a UV lens at that? So who was really the first? Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks? Well, by the way we were able to travel the globe by use of star charts, I would say the use of celestial objects in diagrams has been going on since ancient times, perhaps before the dawn of history. Maybe I'm wrong, but then the sun, the moon and stars are very bright and semi-predictable. Maybe we should think about the Egyptian pyramids. Do they not represent Orion? While the sky isn't technically a telescopic lens, it is a lens, and thus acts to magnify the interest of the many civilizations through out the our long history. Just remember, the telescope just gave us all a closer look at things we had already known to exist.
If you compare the lower sketch with an image of today's full moon, it seems it has rotated clockwise about 30 degrees since the sketch was made by Thomas Harriot. Compare the sketch with this moon map (scroll down, mouse-over) and locate Mare Crisium on both - a crater on the extreme right at between 2 and 3 o'clock on the map, but between 3 and 4 o'clock on the sketch. A more dramatic difference can be seen if you imagine a humanoid figure created by Mare Serenitatis as the head, Mare Traquillitatis as the thorax, Mare Nectaris as the left leg, and Mare Fecunditatis as the right leg. In the sketch, the impression of an armless figure is stronger. Comparing this figurene in the sketch with same on today's moon shows the "rotation" far more dramatically. When I compared the sketch to some other images of the modern moon I got the impression of a rotation approaching 60 degrees. I don't think we can attribute this apparent descrepancy to the optics, which I can't imagine would be able to rotate an image like that. We could easily imagine an error in sketching which may be accounted by his notebook being somewhat askew at the time he made the sketch. The last possibility is that perhaps the moon has shifted a bit in the past 400 years?
This does seem to be an accurate depiction of the "Moon". Upon further reading I discovered that the sketch was of the Terminator. Skynet must have had no choice but to hunt down Sarah Connor's ancestors in the 17th Century. This armless depiction seems quite feasible considering numerous Terminator run-ins with industrial machinery.
When you've finished being a total cock, perhaps you could apply some common sense as to what they meant by "the whole moon" in the context of the knowledge available at the time.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's clearly not the first moon map, it's the first space station map.
kinda like Who moved my cheese?
The paper rotation idea is interesting, but before assuming the moon itself rotated with respect to the earth, wouldn't it just be easier to assume he sketched it at a different time of night at, at a different latitude, and/or different season then used "towards the ground as I'm looking at it" as down in the sketch? The moon's apparent orientation wrt one's line of sight on earth depends on all those things. Perhaps knowing where he sketched it and at what time of year, one could then figure out what time of night he did his work.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
I can barely see a difference. If there is a shift, it's around 7-12 degrees, and either way it can be explained best by a slanted notepad, not a slanted moon.
Isn't it possible that the observers were just looking at it from different angles? Imagine the moon is directly overhead, and you aim a camera (or telescope) at it. What is the "top" of the moon? You could rotate the camera to any angle to make any part of the moon you wanted to be on the top of the photograph.
The moon of course isn't directly overhead most of the time, so the angle someone is observing it from could depend on the time of night, where they are on earth, etc.
These old guys didn't draw the whole moon. The rear of the moon wasn't observed till the 2nd half of the 20th century.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
When you look at the moon from New Zealand, it appears to be "upside down" compared with how it looks in the UK. I assume therefore that the moon is "a different way up" depending on where on earth you look at it from, which would make sense. The moon map you link to is presumably as seen from Russia (it's a .ru site), Harriot was I assume in the UK. This might account for the difference you mention?
/.er can enlighten us?
However, no doubt some astronomically-aware
For 400 years, surely the Moon is one of the first things everybody with a telescope has pointed it at. The difference between Galileo and those before and since is the high quality of the inferences he made from the very limited glimpses he had of the sky. Harriot will remain a footnote because the race to draw the first map is secondary to its scientific interpretation.
At the other end of the human spectrum, many people don't even realize the Moon is visible during the daytime. Their world view simply equates the daylight hours with the Sun and the nighttime hours with the Moon. Even if they do happen to notice the Moon high in the sky before sunset, not a single neuron clicks. A lot of astronomy is possible even without a telescope, cf. Tycho, whose name now graces a most beautiful crater, http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/html/object_page/clm_usgs_14.html.
Two points:
1) Astronomical telescopes are designed with the fewest possible optical elements since each surface degrades the image. Such simple telescopes invert the image, http://www.grantvillegazette.com/articles/Seeing_the_Heavens. Astronomers these days will often scribble arrows on the glass of their monitors to indicate which way is North and which way is East. Some cameras even flip the images backwards, not just upside-down.
2) The Moon's orbit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_the_Moon) is inclined with respect to the Earth's equator. As a result, the illumination of the terminator shifts through a large angle depending on the Moon's declination above or below the equator. Similarly, libration allows observers on Earth to see a few degrees beyond the poles or limb of the Moon.
Careful, this is a FRENCH url.
From France. (.fr)
Do NOT click on it!
.
- aqk
F U
I love being dutch. ;)
Holland made history.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Libration, perhaps?