• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1223 0

the dark, flat areas on the moon were seas, real watery oceans, and that the bright and rougher regions densely studded with craters were continents. These maria (Latin for “seas”) were named primarily after states of mind or conditions of nature: Mare Frigoris (the Sea of Cold), Lacus Somniorum (the Lake of Dreams), Mare Crisium (the Sea of Crises), Sinus Iridum (the Bay of Rainbows), Mare Serenitatis (the Sea of Serenity), Oceanus Procellarum (the Ocean of Storms), Mare Nubium (the Sea of Clouds), Mare Fecunditatis (the Sea of Fertility), Sinus Aestuum (the Bay of Billows), Mare Imbrium (the Sea of Rains) and Mare Tranquillitatis (the Sea of Tranquillity)—a poetic and evocative collection of place names, particularly for so inhospitable an environment as the Moon. Unfortunately, the lunar maria are bone-dry, and samples returned from them by the U.S. Apollo and Soviet Luna missions imply that never in their past were they filled with water. There never were seas, bays, lakes or rainbows on the Moon. These names have survived to the present. The first spacecraft to return data from the surface of the Moon, Luna 2, touched down in Mare Imbrium; and the first human beings to make landfall on our natural satellite, the astronauts of Apollo 11, did so, ten years later, in Mare Tranquillitatis. I think Galileo would have been surprised and pleased.

Despite Hevelius’ misgivings, the lunar craters were named after scientists and philosophers by Giovanni Battista Riccioli in a 1651 publication, Almagestum Novum. The title of the book means “The New Almagest,” the old Almagest having been the life’s work of Ptolemy. (“Almagest,” a modest title, means “The Greatest” in Arabic.) Riccioli simply published a map on which he placed his personal preferences for crater names, and the precedent and many of his choices have been followed without question ever since. Riccioli’s book came out nine years after the death of Galileo, and there has certainly been adequate opportunity to rename craters later. Nevertheless, astronomers have retained this embarrassingly ungenerous recognition of Galileo. Twice as large as crater Galileo is one called Hell after the Jesuit father Maximilian Hell.

One of the most striking of the lunar craters is Clavius, 142 miles in diameter and the site of a fictional lunar base in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clavius is the Latinized name of Christoffel Schlüssel (= “key” in German = Clavius), another member of the Jesuit order, and a supporter of Ptolemy. Galileo engaged in a protracted controversy on the priority of discovery and the nature of sunspots with yet another Jesuit priest, Christopher Scheiner, which developed into a bitter personal antagonism and which is thought by many historians of science to have contributed to the house arrest of Galileo, the proscription of his books, and his confession, extracted under threat of torture by the Inquisition, that his previous Copernican writings were heretical and that Earth did not move. Scheiner is commemorated by a lunar crater 70 miles across. And Hevelius, who objected altogether to the naming of lunar features after people, has a handsome crater named after himself.

Riccioli gave the names Tycho, Kepler and, interestingly, Copernicus to three of the most prominent craters on the Moon. Riccioli himself and his student Grimaldi received large craters at the limb, or edge, of the moon, Riccioli’s being 106 miles across. Another prominent crater is named Alphonsus after Alphonso X of Castile, a thirteenth-century Spanish monarch who had commented, after witnessing the complexity of the Ptolemaic system, that had he been present at the Creation, he could have given God some useful suggestions on ordering the universe. (It is amusing to imagine Alphonso X’s response were he to learn that seven hundred years later a nation across the Western ocean would send an engine called Ranger 9 to the Moon, automatically producing images of the lunar surface as it descended, until finally it crashed in a pre-existing depression named, after His Castilian Majesty, Alphonsus.)