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.

Re:Unsung hero of science?

[DavidR1991]

That's a rather harsh thing to say - there are probably a multitude of reasons why he didn't publish his work (maybe he didn't realise the significance of his work - or he may have been at risk of religious/political persecution. It's pretty hard to say, but I bet there is a good reason why his work wasn't published/spread)

July 1609

[Psion]

July 1609 ... and three hundred and sixty years later, humans walked on its surface.

Re:Galileo's contribution was different

[thermian]

These were groundbreaking discoveries because they destroyed the Scholastic world-view as effectively as the Theory of Relativity replaced absolute space and time.

Contrary to populer beleif, Einstein did not replace Newtons work with his spacetime/relativity work. Rather, he enhanced it.

If it were replaced, we would no longer use it, and yet Newtons work is applied on a daily basis, both in actual space operations and research. I use his (still very cool) equations in my own research.

There may be a time when Newtons aproximations are no longer used, but I don't see it happening any time soon.

There are areas for which we cannot use Newtons equations. Without application of Einsteins work satellite systems wouldn't function and our more advanced astronomy would simply fail, not to mention physics. But when it comes to the horribly complex task of geting a spacecraft from one place to another, its still Newton all the way.

Moon seems to have rotated in the past 400 years?

[TropicalCoder]

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 [penpal.ru] (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?