[FPSPACE] The lunar farside before Luna 3

[LARRY KLAES]

I once saw a World Book Encyclopedia entry on the Moon which made a guess at the

appearance of the lunar farside.  Though I no longer have access to that book, I recall

they predicated a number of small maria scattered across the surface.  Not sure about

the numbers of types of craters, but it was not a mirror image of the near side.

 

Thanks for sharing.

 

Larry


 


Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:14:56 +0200
From: paolo.ulivi at tiscali.it
To: fpspace at friends-partners.org
Subject: [FPSPACE] The lunar farside before Luna 3

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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