Photos that catch our timeless occupation of the moon

We will never stop thinking and talking about the moon, says Matthew Shindell, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.

“In cities where there is a lot of artificial light that tends to make it hard to look at the stars, the moon still shines very much for us. Although we kind of hidden the stars, the moon is still this very constant presence in our night wherever we are, ”he says.

IN Lunar: A Moon’s History in Myths, Short and FabricAs Shindell edited, 19 writers tell the story of this coexistence between humanity and the heavenly body through a series of insightful essays, striking images and detailed maps of the geological features of the Moon.

“It’s a story of how people’s views on the whole universe change, their views on how physics worlds, their views on their place in the universe and what the purpose of the universe is,” says Shindell.

Geological maps – nearly four dozen of them – position Lunar To change the readers’ understanding of the moon’s realities. They are part of Lunar Atlas produced by NASA and the united states of geological survey between 1962 and 1974 and are based on telescopic observations, images and samples trapped by robotic lands and astronauts.

On these maps, the Moon is divided into 144 sections called Quadrangles, some of which were named as the 1600s when cartographers began to draw what they saw through newly developed telescopes (see below).

In addition to being scientific documents, the cards revealed the culture of their time. Parts of the moon were named after modern monarchs, such as Oceanus Philippicus for King Philip IV of Spain. The dark plains of the moon were often labeled “lakes” because the earliest opposite imagined they were like the oceans of the earth. A quick look at moon cards, even today, can let you think of sailing Sea of ​​Serenity or taking a dip in the rainbow.

The more powerful telescopes became, the more they stabbed our notions of the moon, Saud. A prominent example is “Great Moon Hoax” from 1835 when New York Sun The newspaper published a number of false remuneration about the discovery of life on the moon appanized by engravings of flight and otherwise amazing beings. The same era saw the beginning and poliferation of science fiction stories of removing the moon and connecting stories of old people who are preparing it as a deity to modern writers who folded it into their vision of a scientifically advanced future.

Shindell says that even with scientific progress, many researchers continued to appreciate a very direct and personal approach to the moon. It became possible to photograph the moon in the 1840s by combining Camuras and telescopes, but because of the technological challenges, many moon martographs still found their eyes as the best card making instrument.

The map below shows the Petavius ​​square, named after the theologian of the 17th century Denis Peta, and has a crater of the same name measuring almost 200 kilometers in diameter.

The quadrangle named after the ancient Roman emperor Theophilus is dotted with many smaller craters – a testimony to how much of the moon’s geological history has been marked by asteroid bomb attacks. As not in LunarThe moon’s surface preserves the “history of violence in our solar system”, which marked the early days of the system. Such a story is not evident on Earth where water and life continue to reshape the surface of the planet.

The second card, reproduced here, shows Humors Sea, a plain of what was lava, dotted with smaller craters.

During their visit to the Moon in 1969, Aldrin used a lunar surface camera to capture a close -up of his colleague astronaut’s shoes and the pressure it made in the Moon’s Earth (see main image). Over the next three years, the crews from six different missions from the Apollo Bush program were over 380 kg of that land back to Earth for study. A better understanding of moon dust or regolith remains a highest priority with experience exploring where it goes out to make moon -based bricks or cultivation of food.

NASA’s Apollo missions sacrificed a new perspective on our planet through photographs such as the one by the Earth that rises the Moon depicted below. It inverts the roles of the two celestial bodies, again emphasizes that we are as connected to the moon as it is for us.

And the next several years are likely to add chapters to the centuries -long story laid out in Lunar. By 2025 alone, almost a dozen spacecraft team plans to visit the moon.

“When we start sending even more people to the moon and doing more on the moon, its cultural meaning will only rise as it becomes a place that is now even closer to human existence,” says Shindell.