When Galileo announced the existence of mountains, craters, and “seas” on the surface of the moon, his announcement came in the form of a book, the Sidereus Nuncius, or Starry Messenger. It included the first printed telescopic images of the moon. This exhibition explores how the face of the moon has been variously depicted in the years since, from Galileo to the Apollo Program. Enter the exhibition >
Galileo’s printed observations about the face of the moon in spring of 1610 forever changed our view of the universe. Since antiquity the moon had been considered a "heavenly" object, made of a perfect uniform substance, eternal, immune to change. Galileo saw the moon as a world, made of the same elements as our own planet. He literally brought the heavens down to earth. More >
1610
1645
Sidereus nuncius. -- Venice: apud Thomam Baglionum, 1610.
The modern face of the moon first emerged in the early evening of November 30, 1609, when Galileo Galilei in Padua turned his telescope toward the moon, noted the irregularities of the crescent face, and made a drawing to record his discoveries. He made at least five more drawings of the moon over the next eighteen days, prepared careful watercolor sketches from these drawings, and then selected four of these to be engraved for his revolutionary Starry Messenger, which appeared the following March. Galileo's treatise announced to an astonished public that the moon was a cratered chunk of elements --a world -- and not some globe of quintessential perfection. It was a new land, to be explored, charted, and named. The science of selenography was born.
Several lunar features are quite recognizable in this engraving, the second in the series, based on a sketch made on December 3, 1609. The mountains east of Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains) form the ring at the top, and the sizable crater at the bottom is probably Albategnius, here quite a bit larger than life, and undoubtedly conveying by its grandeur the impression it made on Galileo's mind.
Sidereus nuncius. -- Frankfurt: in Paltheniano, 1610.
Galileo's sensational pamphlet quickly reached Germany, where it was reissued in a pirated edition in Frankfurt. In the haste of this surreptitious enterprise, little time or expense was devoted to copying Galileo's careful lunar engravings. Consequently, the Frankfurt edition contains woodcuts, not engravings, much less skillfully executed than the original illustrations. Even worse, the woodcuts are improperly oriented and identified.
None of this would be worth mentioning, except that the Frankfurt woodcuts were the source for the illustrations in most of the later editions of the Sidereus Nuncius, and in many moon handbooks right up to the present day. This has led unwary scholars, who fail to consult the first edition, unfairly to deprecate the Galileo images as crude and unrealistic.
In the original edition, this page had two lunar engravings: the upper one showed the moon just before third quarter, and the lower one recorded the moon a day later. Here we have two woodcut copies of those engravings, but the order has been reversed, and both woodcuts have been printed upside down, so that the large crater is now at the top and Mare Imbrium is at the bottom.
Oculus Enoch et Eliae, sive Radius sidereomysticus. -- Antwerp: Ex officina typographica Hieronymi Verdussii, 1645.
Schyrleus de Rheita was a Capuchin priest who left Bohemia during the Thirty Years War and conducted his optical and astronomical work in Belgium. This treatise on optics includes a map of the full moon--the first on a reasonably large scale. Rheita is noted in the history of optics for his invention of the erecting eyepiece. It is ironic that his lunar map is one of the first to have the south pole at the top, showing the moon inverted, as it appears through an astronomical telescope without his eyepiece.
Rheita's map has not been much appreciated, probably because it was so soon eclipsed by the more splendid efforts of Hevelius, Divini, and Grimaldi, but it captures the brilliant ray system of Tycho (feature A) much better than any other illustration to that time, as well as the mountainous nature of the Apennines (E). The floors of the craters Plato (Q) and Grimaldi (u) are properly depicted as black.
