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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.
No, the LMAA (Lunar Map Association of America) currently has the copyright, and is subpoenaing the descendants of aforementioned Lord Egremont
I sat down to write a new sig tonight and all I did was make the chair warm.
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.
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."
"if you took your own photo of them, you would have the copyright to it"
Wrong (In the US).
In the US we don't give copyright for simply making a faithful reproduction of anything. You didn't add any new creative element by taking a photograph of a piece of paper. This is why Google does not hold a copyright on the scans of public domain works. (but they do limit their use based on Contracts/TOS, which is fine, you can sign away your rights in a contract)
For the court case which spells this out see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp.
Now, in the UK, what you said is probably correct. They are, in my opinion, wrongly assigning copyright to people based on "sweat of the brow" work, not creativity.
July 1609 ... and three hundred and sixty years later, humans walked on its surface.
I didn't see the brown rope. I looked and looked but could not find it. Please link to a brown rope next time.
They have the full support of the LMAO (Lunar Map Association of Oman) in this endeavor.
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.
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?
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."
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.