The First Moon Map, and Not By Galileo 82
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.
Meh. (Score:3, Insightful)
Unsung hero of science? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Galileo's contribution was different (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Unsung hero of science? (Score:4, Insightful)
Dogma.
If a person makes private discoveries that are later uncovered, it's still valuable.
If heroism requires personal risk, there are plenty other ways an investigator could endanger themselves in the pursuit of knowledge.
All that said, Harriot is still probably not a hero.
Re:Unsung hero of science? (Score:5, Insightful)
first maps "of the whole moon"? orly? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
Re:first maps "of the whole moon"? orly? (Score:3, Insightful)
Looking at a different angle (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Meh. (Score:2, Insightful)
Tell you what, CastrTroy, I'll give you a telescope that is the equal to what Harriot used (a telescope, by the way, that's inferior to even the cheapest toy telescope sold by Edmund Scientific.) [scientificsonline.com] a pencil and a pad of paper, and lets see YOU do a better job of mapping the Lunar surface.