[FPSPACE] The lunar farside before Luna 3

[Paolo Ulivi]

Speaking of the first pictures of the farside of the Moon, released by the
Soviet Union 50 years ago these days, I have unearthed a paper from my
collection of vintage space magazines predicting what the farside would look
like. The paper is "The Other Side of the Moon" by the experienced
selenographer H Percy Wilkins (the discoverer of Mare Orientale) published
in the January 1953 issue of the JBIS.
I have put Wilkins' map of the farside here:
http://i83.servimg.com/u/f83/11/13/59/33/farsid10.gif Although he was
completely wrong in predicting the presence of large maria, he did a
remarkable work of back-tracing young rays on the lunar limb to the farside,
where he found that they converged to nine craters. I believe that one of
them was Giordano Bruno.
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