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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.
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.
They have the full support of the LMAO (Lunar Map Association of Oman) in this endeavor.
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?