Maps of the Moon

Map History

Editor-in-Chief

Carla Lois (University of Buenos Aires, CONICET)

Editorial Board

Jordana Dym (Skidmore College)

Matthew Edney (University of Southern Maine)
André Reyes Novaes (Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ))
Chet Van Duzer (Stanford University, David Rumsey Map Center)
Nicolas Verdier (French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS))

Volumes published in this Brill Research Perspectives title are listed at brill.com/rpmh
Maps of the Moon
Lunar Cartography from
the Seventeenth Century to the Space Age

By

Thomás A. S. Haddad

LEIDEN | BOSTON
This paperback book edition is simultaneously published as issue 1.2 (2019) of Map History,
doi:10.1163/25893963-12340002.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019919176

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.

ISBN 978-90-04-40088-7 (paperback)

ISBN 978-90-04-40089-4 (e-book)

Copyright 2019 Thomás A. S. Haddad. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi,
Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without prior written permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided
that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910,
Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.

This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents

Maps of the Moon

Lunar Cartography from the Seventeenth Century to the Space Age 1
Thomás A. S. Haddad
Abstract 1
Keywords 1
Introduction: Bringing the History of Cartography to the History of
Moon Maps 1
1 Approaches to the Specificity of Moon Maps 11
2 Making It Visible: Bringing the Moon Down to the Earth 20
2.1 The Telescope Enters the Stage 20
2.2 Assembling Naturalistic Depictions: a Visual Exercise 22
3 Making It Legible: Taking the Earth up to the Moon 24
3.1 Colonial Reflections on the Moon 24
3.2 Non Sufficit Orbis: Claiming the Moon for a King, or a Politics of
Lunar Cartography 26
3.3 A Moon Map We All Agree to Call a Map 30
4 Time Concreted 34
4.1 Moonstruck by Selenographia 34
4.2 Hevelius’s Cartographic Invention 41
4.3 Eclipse Maps and Do-It-Yourself Cartography 49
4.4 They Have Been Hevelian Too 54
5 Time Abstracted 58
5.1 Known Unknowns 58
5.2 Tobias Mayer, Model Employee 63
5.3 Map Space Is All That Matters 66
5.4 Surveying Takes Hold: Another Visual Exercise 72
6 Time Eliminated 72
6.1 Feeling There 74
6.2 Being There 83
Concluding Remarks: the Moon Is Dead, Long Live the Moon 85
Bibliography 88
Maps of the Moon
Lunar Cartography from the Seventeenth Century to the Space Age

Thomás A. S. Haddad
University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil
thaddad@usp.br

Abstract

When does a depiction of the moon become a lunar map? This essay addresses this
question from theoretical and historical standpoints. It is argued that moon maps are
of crucial importance to the history of cartography, for they challenge established no-
tions of what is a map, how it functions, what are its purposes, and what kind of power
it embodies and performs. The work also shows how terrestrial cartography has shaped
the history of lunar mapping since the seventeenth century, through visual and no-
menclature conventions, the cultural currency of maps, mapmakers’ social standing,
and data-gathering and projection practices. It further demonstrates that lunar cartog-
raphy has also been organized by an internal principle that is born of the fundamental
problem of how to create static map spaces capable of representing a referent that is
constantly changing to our eyes, as is the visible face of the moon. It is suggested that
moon maps may be classed on three broad categories, according to the kinds of solu-
tions for this representational problem that have been devised over the last 400 years.

Keywords

maps of the moon – selenography – history of cartography – history of astronomy –

time in maps

Introduction: Bringing the History of Cartography to the History of

Moon Maps

None of the convicts could have had an idea of their destination. Before
them yawned a terrifying void of time and space. (…) If they had been
told they were off to the moon, the sense of loss, deracination and fear

© Thomás A. S. Haddad, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004400894_002

2 Haddad

could hardly have been worse—at least one could see the moon from
England, which could not be said for Botany Bay.
Roberts Hughes, The Fatal Shore (1986)

The opening words show art critic and literary author Robert Hughes trying to
capture the dread and despair that must have taken hold of the first convicts
deported from Britain to Australia. For them, in the late eighteenth century,
when Hughes’s novel is set, Botany Bay was at best a drawing on a map, per-
haps not even that. The moon, however, had always been there, as it had for
every other person in history. Better be sent to a familiar other world than to an
unimaginable place that was part of “this world” only by convention (and car-
tographic artifice). Hughes’s convicts could hardly have known, but at the time
of their suffering there existed many more maps of the lunar surface than of
Botany Bay’s shores, where they would meet their fate. Indeed, starting around
the middle of the previous century, dozens, maybe hundreds, of maps of the
moon were drawn, printed, copied and debated. They came in all flavors and
sizes: some were inserted in books, others stood alone, some were sketches
or diagrams used to make a point in a cosmological argument, others looked
almost like large-scale regional maps. They resembled terrestrial maps in many
of their visual features: lines, blank spaces, hachuring, stippling, graduated
scales, graticules, ornamentation, and inscriptions. A large number of them
even showed the names of hundreds of places on the moon, places collec-
tively called oceans, seas, valleys, mounts, capes and so on. Unlike Botany Bay,
however, no one had ever been to the moon—and would not be for another
two centuries.
This “distant closeness” of the moon is by no means a flight of fancy from
a late-twentieth century novel such as Hughes’s. “The moon, for early mod-
ern Englishmen,” writes historian David Cressy, “was comfortingly familiar yet
achingly distant” (Cressy 2006, 961). Although he writes specifically of early
modern England, there is no doubt that elsewhere too the moon and its phases
had “helped regulate mundane activities, from the planting of crops to the let-
ting of blood, as well as governed the washing of the tides.” In Europe, specu-
lation about the inhabitability of the moon came all the way from antiquity,
with strong opinions in favor as well as to the contrary. Questions revolved
around the physical nature of the moon, God’s designs for creation, and the
place of the earth in the universe. In the early modern period, this speculation
“was stimulated by Renaissance voyaging and geography, with frequent com-
parisons to America, which had been unknown before Columbus, and to the
Antipodes, most of which remained undiscovered” (Cressy 2006, 962). Literary
works that reached considerably large audiences helped move the debate out
Maps of the Moon 3

of scholarly circles to much wider publics: from Plutarch and Lucian to Cyrano
de Bergerac and John Wilkins, through Juan de Maldonado, Johannes Kepler,
Francis Godwin and many others, narratives of voyages to the moon consti-
tuted almost a genre and helped create visions of what the moon might look
like on close inspection (see Montgomery 1999, chapters 4 and 9; Nicolson
1948). Necessarily, such accounts carried expectations of what the moon could
be in terms of geography, and were firmly based on our sole experience of
space—terrestrial space—, multifarious as such experience and its represen-
tations, including cartographic ones, might be.
Inhabited or not, the moon was unquestionably out of reach. Early modern
audiences knew all too well that fictional accounts of voyages to our sister ce-
lestial body were moralizing tales or allegories, and not anticipations of any-
thing that they or their immediate descendants would be able to undergo. Yet,
starting in the seventeenth century, this unreachable world has been mapped
countless times and its most minute surface features have been given names,
thousands of them. Moon maps appeared in expensive books and cheap man-
uals, as ornaments to terrestrial maps and as broadsheet engravings with lavish
forms of ornamentation of their own. They are to be found in encyclopedias
and textbooks, t-shirts and mugs, as glossy-paper wall posters, and folded maps
published by the exact same companies that produce roadmaps of this kind.
But a moon map will not help anyone find their way when lost or planning an
itinerary; it will not help in visualizing one’s “place in the world” (or convincing
one that there is such a thing); it cannot be used in territorial claims or border
disputes, or to settle property quarrels, place troops, mark treasuries, estimate
travel times, change trains, or represent the spatial distribution of industries,
activities, average temperatures or whatever else one can come up with.1 At
first sight, moon maps seem absolutely unable to perform any single function
usually ascribed to maps—and in this they are, in a way, refreshingly “useless.”
We cannot avoid asking, then, what is a moon map after all?2
Before moving on to some possible ways of approaching the question
(which does not mean it has a definitive answer), which I will attempt to do
in the first part of this essay, let us start by considering in general terms how
“mainstream” work on the history of terrestrial cartography can be brought to

1  I am obviously thinking of thematic cartography in the last few examples. Nevertheless, one
should not rush into believing the moon does not have its own brand of thematic maps,
representing spatial distributions of properly lunar properties. Indeed, there are many maps
of lunar surface temperatures, soil composition, or geological structure, to name the most
well-known.
2  Here and in much of what follows I am strongly indebted to Christian Jacob’s seminal essay
“What is a map?” (Jacob 2006, chapter 1).
4 Haddad

bear on the study of selenography (i.e., lunar mapping). As much as maps of

imaginary places, or thematic maps that spatialize complex social phenom-
ena, or diagram-maps of public transportation networks, or portolan charts,
among numerous other examples, moon maps indeed may be an interesting
testing ground for concepts and themes prominent in recent approaches to the
history of cartography. A good way to see this is by looking at what critics claim
to be the unfulfilled promises of these approaches.
J. H. Andrews, for instance, in a critical introduction to a collection of
J. B. Harley’s writings, challengingly remarked that “positivist historians have
plenty to do when confronted with a previously unknown map. Besides es-
tablishing its date and authorship, they can analyze material form, method of
drawing or reproduction, use of inks or paints (…).” The list goes on and on, and
then comes Andrews’s coup de grace: “What can the nonpositivist scholar do
except say, ‘Just as I thought: more glorification of state power’ (…)?” (Andrews
2001, 31–32). Of course, Andrews’s target is what he sees as an over-confident
attitude and the under-performance of Harley’s pleas to politicize the history
of cartography. Moon maps can neatly turn this scathing critique upside-down:
when confronted with a lunar map, positivist and non-positivist historians
alike may be surprised to exclaim, “What, glorification of state power, here?”
Well indeed, yes: if not on the moon itself, there is a remarkable level of politi-
cal activity on moon maps. And yet, they allow for a gaze that is not from the
start conditioned by the expectation of seeing “territories,” in the usual geo-
political sense, or borders, or power play in any straightforward sense. Thus,
moon maps may offer ways of “politicizing the map” that avoid the pitfalls of a
simple “everything is political” approach.
Consider also Harley’s highly influential propositions about “silences” in
maps, not merely those blank spaces born out of genuine ignorance, but pur-
poseful erasures, withholdings of information, or substitutions (Harley 1988a).
We could legitimately wonder that, since there is nobody to be subdued on
the moon, no territory to be claimed, no riches to be hidden, no original place
names to be stricken out of the map, there is simply no point in looking for
cartographic silences on lunar maps. Once again, this assumption would be
wrong: silences have been in fact abundant, especially in disputes over nomen-
clature or over the proper way of representing physical features of the moon.3

3  Harley’s ideas on silences and “external power” come together in such an unreasonably per-
fect way in the fact that the earliest maps of the far-side of the moon named all surface
features after Soviets—who were responsible for the first images of that side—that one is
tempted to look for less obvious cases (for the question of external power, see Harley 1988b).
On empty space, see also Hiatt (2002) and Lois (2018a).
Maps of the Moon 5

Many other themes that figure prominently in recent approaches to the

history of cartography could also be pursued using moon maps as privileged
sources. To mention one last example, we could think of the question of the
relationships between cartography and landscape as an object of enduring in-
terest and stage of important theoretical debates. This may seem trivial, but
I cannot fail to add that, for the overwhelming majority of human beings, the
moon has always been and will remain irredeemably detached in a physical
sense, even if affectively close. Even the telescope or any kind of artificial sys-
tem of vision offer no hope of really changing this simple truth: we are not
there. The moon is the object of a permanently distant gaze. Thus, it offers the
exact opposite of our earthly experience of space, which is always marked by
our own belonging. Beyond a certain scale, terrestrial maps place the viewer
in a position she will never truly occupy with her body or experience with her
senses. In the case of moon maps, however, it is the large scale, that of land-
scape, that causes this feeling of uprooting.
How then, and if so in what manner, has the specialized literature on the
history of moon maps responded to the many ideas coming from the critical
history of (invariably terrestrial) cartography in the last few decades? Although
not hopelessly vast, the body of work on moon maps is by no means meager.
I think we may usefully classify the available works in two broad categories,
each one characterized more by the way the subject is approached than by
any other factor, such as temporal breadth or thematic concerns. The first ap-
proach is arguably the one most removed from the preoccupations that have
been dominant of late in the history of cartography in general. In many ways
this approach keeps up with the traditional outlook of the discipline: a view of
lunar mapping as the quest for ever more accurate representations, not without
its occasional share of failures and backward steps, but nevertheless steadily
progressing toward “better” maps and systems of nomenclature. Attention is
devoted to technical aspects of moon maps and mapmaker’s practices: the
quality of engravings, standardization of visual elements, the accurate place-
ment and shape of represented features, the characteristics of observational
equipment, the choice of a mathematical projection or lack thereof, the clarity
or elegance or importance of the final product, the logic and predictability of
the nomenclature system, to name but a few.
Such approaches could unjustly be branded as simply ahistorical. Often
they allow coherent attempts to be made at evaluating maps against standards
of their time, or stimulate insights of true connoisseurship: does a lunar map
bring ornamentation, cartouches, or allegories typical of contemporary terres-
trial maps? Is it dedicated to patrons? Has the copperplate been reused? How
many states of the engraving are extant? Is it rare, expensive, or ultimately
6 Haddad

important according to some criterion? Scholarly works belonging to this

tradition should in no way be dismissed as old-fashioned or “positivist.” Or
perhaps we could simply say that even if many works of this kind are indeed
positivist, this is no ground for dismissing them altogether. On the contrary,
they are usually the best sources of information on tens or hundreds of lunar
maps (many of them very hard to access), their detailed physical character-
istics, their makers and making.4 The best examples are the monographs by
Ewen Whitaker (1999), and Zdenek Kopal and Robert W. Carder (1974), each
among the most distinguished selenographers of the twentieth century.5
These works will remain unsurpassed in breadth and detail, and are manda-
tory reading for anyone interested in the subject. Whitaker in particular has
no rival in the spotting of forgeries, incorrect placements, or inconsistencies
in nomenclature systems, as part of a labor of unparalleled devotion to moon
maps that was undertaken over half a century.
Sharing in the same general approach to the question of how to write
the history of moon maps, we find highly specialized investigations of par-
ticular maps or mapmakers. The case of the Belgian Jesuit priest and scholar
Henri Bosmans is a perfect example. Partaking in that unmistakable brand of
nineteenth-century erudition, Bosmans published a series of articles on the
1645 moon map of Flemish cartographer Michael Florent van Langren, the first
printed lunar chart with toponymy included. Published more than one hun-
dred years ago, Bosmans’s papers are still the inevitable point of departure for
any investigation of Van Langren’s moon: they narrate in painstaking detail the
years of activities leading up to the map, transcribe dozens of letters, petitions,
grants of privilege, censures (in Latin, French, Spanish, and Dutch, dispersed in
archives in different countries), correct previous assumptions through careful
criticism of the sources, and, as if all this was not enough, meticulously com-
pare extant versions of the map to establish the sequence of states the engrav-
ing went through (see Bosmans 1903; 1910).
Works of this kind are foundational for any further research into the particu-
lar moon maps or mapmakers they address. Just like the encyclopedic mono-
graphs by Whitaker, and Kopal and Carder, their value resides on the rigor of

4  On the subject of map catalogs and descriptions, it should be mandatory to mention the
immense work of the International Cartographic Association’s Commission of Planetary
Cartography, which maintains an online database of thousands of lunar and other planet’s
maps from 1600 to 2017. (On last consultation the database included 2,506 planetary and
moon maps of all different kinds.) See: https://planetcarto.wordpress.com/resources/.
5  There are also many shorter works that are, nevertheless, equally broad in scope and rigor-
ously descriptive in purview: see for instance Raposo (2018), Wolfschmidt (2013), van Gent
and Van Helden (2007), Pigatto and Zanini (2001), or Paluzie i Borrell (1967).
Maps of the Moon 7

descriptive detail and the wealth of information they convey. Highly specialized
or all encompassing, these works represent an approach to map history that is
based on the premise that documents will speak for themselves. One should not
demand from these works something they never intended to present in the first
place, like “theory” (in a grand sense) or even the kind of dense contextualiza-
tion we have grown used to expecting to find in historical works in general.
Deep attention to context in particular is to be found in a second category of
approaches to the history of moon maps, which leads us into firm cultural his-
tory ground. Here we can expect “thick descriptions” of the contexts in which
lunar maps appeared, how they functioned in these contexts, and the social
practices attendant to their creation, circulation, usage, permanence, or obliv-
ion. Many outstanding examples of this approach are to be found, for instance,
in a recent collection edited by Carmen Pérez González, whose chapters range
from an investigation of moon maps and their collectors in Edo Era Japan, to
a connected history of astronomical observatories, lunar maps, photography,
and urban planning in modern Persia, to the establishment and transforma-
tions of the scientific practice of astrophotography in German observatories,
among other very important contributions (Pérez González 2018). Another re-
markable achievement is Nydia Pineda’s doctoral dissertation, hopefully to be
published soon, which ranks as the most thorough contribution to the cultural
history of seventeenth-century selenography to date. In her work, Pineda mas-
terfully weaves threads from the history of science, the history of the book and
print culture, and patronage studies to come up with a complexly nuanced un-
derstanding of lunar maps as artifacts at once technical and symbolic (Pineda
de Ávila 2017).
Keeping in mind the previous broad characterization of the field, I should
now warn readers that my intention in this essay is evidently not to offer yet
another exhaustive examination of 400 hundred years’ worth of moon maps,
with exacting descriptions of dozens of specimens and biographical notices of
their makers. Even less so can I claim the objective of offering a “total” cultural
history of the whole enterprise of lunar mapping. This would be an impossible
task by definition, given the sheer variety of contexts in which they appeared,
the myriad uses they have been put to, and the uncountable fortunes they have
met with, together with those of their respective authors and viewers. Instead,
my intention is to invite a conversation on how the history of cartography as
a more or less discrete discipline (or set of intellectual practices, approaches,
and insights bearing upon maps throughout history) may inform and shape
approaches to the history of moon maps.
The history of cartography is remarkable for how much it welcomes episte-
mological speculation, probably because its main object—the map—remains
8 Haddad

so elusive. This does not mean the existence of a lack of rigor either when
addressing maps as material objects that must be carefully described and
read, or when investigating their contexts using other kinds of documents.
Nonetheless, the history of cartography recognizes the value, for example,
of comparisons between different maps (not in order to judge which one is
“better”) or cartographic practices in ways that other lineages of historical in-
quiry usually reject. In other words, it allows for different preoccupations and
different standards of evidence, which together may cast a different light on
some aspects of moon maps, or suggest new research perspectives.
Of course I cannot claim that this essay will in any way make moon maps
a standard subject in the history of cartography. Additionally, I have no inten-
tion of making it compulsory to historians of science or art, or cultural histori-
ans (the main workers on the rather narrow theme of lunar maps), to redirect
their investigations to meet whatever is emerging from the quarters of the his-
tory of cartography. Yet, any increase, however small, in mutual interest and
cross-pollination between those fields is worth the effort, and if my essay helps
prompt even a single adventure across disciplinary boundaries by some other
explorer, I will be very satisfied. My own exploration here will be guided by one
overarching theme, developed along three interrelated lines. The overarching
theme was already announced in the question, “What is a moon map?” In other
words, I am interested in the specificity of moon maps, if they have one at all.
This is the problem that, in turn, unfolds along three lines. The first relates to
the long-standing tension between naturalistic and more schematic modes of
representation of the moon. Is the “mapness” of an image that has the moon as
its referent somehow connected to the image’s place in this one-dimensional
axis stretching from naturalistic renderings to diagrams? The second line along
which to search for the specificity of lunar maps is the investigation of the
historical relationships that lunar cartography established with its terrestrial
counterpart. Now the focus is not so much on the images, but on the prac-
tices attendant to their creation and from where they extract meaning. Are
there differences between making or viewing a map of the moon and a map of
the earth?
If the previous two lines of inquiry into the specificity of moon maps are
hardly surprising, there is, however, a third one that may claim to be more un-
anticipated: my contention will be that much of the history of lunar mapping
may be profitably seen as a history of specific solutions that were given to the
problem of representing an object that is continuously changing its appear-
ance over time. The moon is obviously, visibly, in a permanent state of change.
At first, one might think this time variation is easy to tame, for it is repeti-
tive and predictable. Selenography would just have to keep clear of the most
Maps of the Moon 9

ostensible changes in appearances (above all the monthly phase cycle) and
chase the underlying, permanent “reality.” But, as the telescope revealed before
the seventeenth century even reached its midpoint, things are more compli-
cated. The moon changes its appearance over time in ways, as we will see, that
are exceedingly difficult to capture in a steady image. The organizing principle
of lunar mapping, the “epistemology of selenography,” would thus be the visual
representation of time as space; not real, physical space, but map space. In
a nutshell, the problem resides in the fact that we do not just see half of the
moon’s surface, but more. Truly, on any given single instant we can see at most
half, but over time the moon reveals more than that. So mapmakers were con-
fronted with the challenge of representing more than half of a spherical sur-
face inside a circular flat space, something that had important consequences
for how moon maps were created and what they made visible.
To my view we can identify at least three different kinds of answers to this
fundamental problem of reducing the moon’s temporal change to a spatial
order that exists only on maps. Each kind of answer represented a roughly suc-
cessive (but not exclusive) trend in selenography. We could name each trend as
the “concretion,” “abstraction,” and “elimination” of time; the first was typical of
the seventeenth century, the second rose to prominence in the mid-eighteenth
century, and the last one became dominant toward the end of the nineteenth
century. This periodization is far from rigid, of course: not only did those trends
live alongside each other on many occasions, but also they cannot be taken to
determine or explain everything there is to be known about moon maps. We
cannot underestimate the determining force of terrestrial cartography in shap-
ing the end results of selenography, i.e., moon maps themselves. They could
not but emulate earth maps in most formal aspects. Terrestrial cartography
was the cultural fountainhead from which lunar mapmakers borrowed most
of their semantics, even if they had to invent new syntactical forms to face the
problem of time.

…
The structure of the essay is as follows: in Section 1 I return to the problem
of the “mapness” of moon maps in general terms, borrowing from work in
the history of (terrestrial) cartography that has made use of concepts coming
from, among others, semiotics or visual studies. Besides expounding in more
detail some ways in which the history of cartography may shed light on the
specific problem posed by lunar maps, I will also explicitly state the issue of
“­naturalistic vs. schematic representation” as it appears on maps of the moon,
using examples.
10 Haddad

In Section 2 I will dwell longer on aspects of the “naturalistic tradition” of

depicting the moon, made possible by the appearance of the telescope in the
first decade of the seventeenth century. Galileo is the dominant figure in this
respect, but I will also present for comparison—or, more properly, as an ex-
ercise in the assemblage of visual/cartographic series (Lois 2015)—four other
instances of this tradition.
Then in Section 3 we move on to the earliest expressions of an alternative
“tradition” that developed alongside the previous one, in the work of terres-
trial cartographers who took an interest in the moon. The moon drawings of
Galileo’s contemporary, Thomas Harriot, although never published, will be
our starting point, for what they can teach us about different reactions to the
new regime of visibility brought about by the telescope. The main substance of
Section 2, though, is Michael Florent van Langren’s project of creating a com-
plete atlas of the moon and giving names to its surface features. Although the
atlas never came into being, Van Langren published in 1645 a map of the full
visible surface of the moon with more than 300 toponyms. The story of his
project and details of the map are discussed at length, because it tells of the
first unequivocal transformation of the lunar surface into a cartographic ob-
ject, by the hands of a seasoned terrestrial cartographer obsessed with solving
the problem of finding longitudes and securing royal patronage.
It is in Section 4 that the issue of representing time-change finally comes to
the fore. I start with a discussion of Johannes Hevelius’s epoch-making book,
Selenographia, containing more images of the moon than the sum total of all
that had appeared before. The main focus is on the remarkable ways Hevelius
invented to explicitly represent, on a single cartographic space, the whole set
of possible appearances of the face of the moon. This is the specific approach
to lunar mapping that I earlier called the “concretion” of time. I will also pres-
ent Hevelius’s lunar eclipse maps, veritable “map-instruments,” as well as those
created by Giovanni Domenico Cassini. Finally, we come to a somewhat un-
orthodox discussion of Hevelius’s legacy, in which I argue for the inclusion of
his main rivals.
Section 5 begins with a consideration of the rise, during the Enlightenment,
of an epistemology based on quantification and interpolation, and how it
paved the way for a new regime of objectivity. In it, visual representations
came to be understood as representations of underlying measurements and
calculations. The main character here is Tobias Mayer, cartographer at the
famed Homann mapmaking firm in Nuremberg. Prompted by the urge to cor-
rect terrestrial maps for gross errors in longitude and by a fierce competition
for markets, Mayer came up with a new solution to the problem of the moon’s
changing face. He saw the moon exactly as a surveyor would see the terrain,
Maps of the Moon 11

i.e., as a triangulation of points, and realized that the effects of changing ap-
pearance over time could be abstracted from a moon map. A few examples of
ulterior maps, showing this new dominance of map space over “optical space,”
are then submitted to readers’ judgments, again as a visual series, with spare
textual commentary.
Finally, Section 6 considers the third mode of dealing with the problem of
time in lunar mapping, the mode I have called “elimination.” Its root lies on a
change of scale: instead of insisting on fitting all that can be seen of the moon’s
surface inside a circular, unitary representation space, mapmakers increasingly
focused on limited areas, amenable to projection onto spaces bounded by four
straight edges. By slicing the moon’s surface into smaller sections, change over
time was eliminated from the picture, and what is more, the point of view from
which the representation made sense moved away from the earth. As I briefly
show toward the end of Section 6, the observer was relocated to none other
than a place that would only be physically attained in the Space Age. After this
a few concluding remarks follow, along with perspectives for further research.

1 Approaches to the Specificity of Moon Maps

We have already met the general question, “What is a moon map?” Replying
casually that it is “a flat graphic representation of the moon’s visible surface”
will not suffice. Any drawing, painting, or photograph that represents some-
thing is, by definition, a “flat graphic representation,” but in the overwhelming
majority of cases they are simply not perceived as maps.6 Even representa-
tions of the earth itself are frequently not maps—whatever we take a map to
be—, but some different kind of visual artifact, subject to regimes of legibility
foreign to the map; it suffices to think of photographs of the planet, like the
one first taken by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, or satellite images. But take a

6  J. H. Andrews famously compiled in a journal article 321 “definitions” of maps that have been
attempted since the mid-seventeenth century up to the 1980s. The general trend is the same
emphasis on flatness and graphics, but there is also an underlying assumption that the rep-
resentation must be “to scale,” and, most importantly, the external referent is tacitly or ex-
plicitly always taken to be the earth (Andrews 1986). In the general preface to the History
of Cartography series, J. B. Harley and David Woodward fittingly downplay the importance
of scale, defining maps as “graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understand-
ing of things, concepts, conditions, processes or events in the human world” (Harley and
Woodward 1987, xvi). Although I fully endorse the view that the moon, like any other “natu-
ral” object, is truly part of “the human world,” this conceptualization of a map is so capacious
that it does not seem to go a long way to shedding more light on the question of what makes
a moon image a map.
12 Haddad

satellite image and superimpose a line drawing to reinforce edges and bound-
aries, a few place names, arrows, dots, a grid: the whole thing starts to resemble
a map, at least to a community whose members share by learning, culture, and
social practice some tacit assumptions about what a map is, without the need
for any explicit definition.
So the question we should pose seems to become, “What does it take for an
image of the moon to become a map for a certain group of viewers?” To adopt
Christian Jacob’s apt formulation, the problem is to investigate the “threshold
of cartographical perception” after which a given flat representation of the
moon starts to be perceived as a map by those who have contact with it.7 The
answer cannot lie simply on the mapmaker’s intentions: “What is a map,”
writes Matthew Edney, “is not defined by the maker but by the user, and by
the context of use.” In other words, it is not enough that the maker wants her
creation to be perceived as a map, or even explicitly calls it a map. It is also
not enough that the artifact itself possesses “map-like features,” so to speak,
for as Edney adds, “ ‘mapness’ is not inherent to an image, but is determined
by the reader” (Edney 2007, 95).8 However, one must be careful in interpreting
this last statement, lest we be content with the impression that, in the end, it
is up to the reader to arbitrarily decide what she will count as maps and what
she will not. This would amount to a simple shift of focus from the suppos-
edly absolute power of a mapmaker’s intentions, perfectly encapsulated in the
formal characteristics of her products, to individual readers’ arbitrary deci-
sions. Of course, as much as there are no all-powerful makers and no perfectly
autonomous images, readers do not simply decide whether they want to call
something a map.
Perhaps it would be more productive to consider that the “threshold of
cartographical perception” depends on the relation between the viewer and
the representation itself, a relation that must take into account the maker’s
intentions and the graphic content of the artifact, as well as on the context
of perception. This context, in its turn, is mediated by the whole ecosystem
of visual representations—its specific visual culture—amidst which makers,
viewers, and graphic artifacts are located. Representing and viewing are
grounded in s­ ocial practices that leave no space for solipsism from any party.

7  Jacob only employs the exact words “threshold of cartographical perception” in a caption
to Figure 2 that accompanies his aforementioned essay, “What is a Map?,” while in the main
text he develops the idea more fully: “A map can be identified, up to a certain threshold of
perception, on the basis of the form of the document and its general graphic organization,
including the distribution of its inscriptions over the surface of the map and the effects of
relief shading” (Jacob 2006, 16).
8  Notice that the terms “user,” “viewer,” and “reader” are being employed interchangeably.
Maps of the Moon 13

“A map is defined perhaps less by formal traits than by the particular conditions
of its production and reception,” writes Jacob (2006, 21). In this way, the thresh-
old emerges from a “semiotic web” that involves actors, objects (including their
“formal traits”), and practices of making and seeing. Indexicality, i.e., the ca-
pacity of signs to point to other things, is enacted by this web, and is what
triggers cartographic perception.9 In a way, then, the map is a speech act that,
just like a natural-language utterance, is as much declarative or propositional
as performative (see Austin 1962).10 This means that it not only “says” some-
thing, but it “does” something too, such as interfering in the conditions of
its own reception: in our case, it would amount to triggering cartographical
perception. As with any speech act, there are no previous guarantees that it
will perform what was intended (if something was intended at all), instead
of something else, as well as no assurance that the results will not change
over time.
To make things more palpable, let us consider one of Galileo Galilei’s
­engravings of the moon as seen through a telescope, part of a group of four
different lunar representations included in his epochal 1610 book, Sidereus
Nuncius (Figure 1). Presented in virtually every work on the history of sele-
nography as the veritable cornerstone of the whole field, Galileo’s images are
nevertheless usually not classed as moon maps, but as “pictures,” perhaps
“portraits.” In this, Galileo’s images do not differ much from artistic depic-
tions of the moon such as one can see in Adam Elsheimer’s oil-on-copper
painting Flight into Egypt, from about 1609 (Howard and Longair 2011), and
Ludovico Cardi, called Cigoli’s 1612 fresco in the dome of a chapel in the
Roman basilica of S. Maria Maggiore, depicting the Virgin with a thoroughly
Galilean moon beneath her feet (Ostrow 1996).11 What they do seem to share is
mimesis—the illusion of vanishing mediation—as the governing principle of
representation.

9  It is interesting to compare this to what science studies scholars John Law and Solveig
Joks say about reality itself: “Since reals are embedded and enacted in webs of practices,
realities cannot be willed into being: there is no comfort here for ‘alternative facts’” (Law
and Joks 2018, 425). These “webs of practices” that largely determine what will count as a
“fact” for a given social collectivity are weaved through actors’ necessarily shared histori-
cal, cultural, and material experiences. What I am suggesting is that exactly the same goes
for what counts as a “map.”
10  For maps as specific devices, see Lois (2018b).
11  Erwin Panofsky highlights that Galileo and Cigoli were united in “a life-long and truly
reciprocal friendship” (Panofsky 1954, 3).
14 Haddad

FIGURE 1 One of the four different copper engravings of the moon “as seen” through the
telescope, published by Galileo in his 1610 Sidereus Nuncius (folio 9v). Notice the
large crater on the lower middle region, right between light and darkness: Galileo
purposefully exaggerated its size and depth to highlight the ruggedness of the
lunar surface.
SOURCE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

But let us now turn our gaze to Figures 2 and 3. Even before learning what they
represent, how they were made, or what their makers’ intentions were, one
may legitimately wonder: can these images be anything other than maps? The
cartographical threshold seems to have been crossed, even if one does not have
the slightest idea what the external referent is. Just from looking at the images
one would be hard pressed to tell they refer to patches of the moon’s surface.
Even a trained viewer, who is able to recognize that the moon is the images’
external referent, might have difficulty telling exactly what portion of the sur-
face is being represented. The images may be taken to be signifiers without a
signified: their referent may be anything from a patch of the earth itself to an
Maps of the Moon 15

FIGURE 2 Section V of Walter Goodacre’s 1910 lunar map in 25 sections. If assembled, they
would result in a moon 1.5 meters wide. Like many other lunar mapmakers,
Goodacre was an “amateur” astronomer, working from his own telescopic obser-
vations. He also used photographs to measure some features’ coordinates, but the
map was entirely hand-drawn. Topography is represented with simple line forms,
and the map does not attempt to reproduce the so-called “albedo,” i.e., variations
in brilliance that are not due to relief alone.
COURTESY UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON FACULTY OF MATHEMATICAL &
PHYSICAL SCIENCES

imaginary place—but they are still identifiable as some kind of map. Family
resemblance seems to be the key factor at play here: the use of line drawing, an
underlying grid, lettering, hachuring, level curves, the page layout itself (in the
case of Figure 3), all point to other artifacts that viewers are collectively used
16 Haddad

FIGURE 3 Map from NASA’s Lunar Astronautical Chart (LAC) Series, published by the
U.S. Air Force’s Chart and Information Center between 1962–1967, in the
framework of the ongoing Apollo Program.
SOURCE: LUNAR AND PLANETARY INSTITUTE

to perceive as maps.12 Also, in both figures we contemplate a self-contained

space of representation, “a mediation that is a signifier with its own codes and
conventions” (Jacob 2006, 12)—in other words, the space of representation is
perceived as map space.
At any rate, we must be wary of any temptation to take “naturalistic rep-
resentation” the standard against which to assert the “mapness” of a moon
image. The problem is that this way of thinking would beg the question what
constitutes a moon map, insofar as “being a map” would depend simply on
how much a given graphic representation deviates from naturalistic conven-
tions. In other words, we would be erroneously conflating maps with things

12  As before, “to point” should be understood semiotically: these signs are not simply part of
propositions (like “the distance from point A to point B is such”), but are performative—
they produce an effect that is not reducible to their descriptive content (Austin 1962).
Maps of the Moon 17

such as “diagrams” or “schemes.” To see the problem, it is enough, on the one

hand, to go back to Figure 3: it has at least one thoroughly naturalistic layer,
even if other layers deliberately break those conventions. On the other hand,
we may imagine a most radically schematic representation: a circle on a blank
piece of paper, with the word “moon” attached somewhere. Indeed, we could
substitute a triangle, a square or any other figure for the circle, inasmuch as we
are concerned with extreme simplification. This would hardly be perceived as
a map, except in quite uncommon regimes of visuality. Thus, the fact is that
there is no simple linear axis with naturalistic representation in one extremity
and highly abstract schemes in the other, with the cartographic threshold lying
somewhere between. Also, the threshold is not a point of no return, as if just
by being “far enough” from naturalism any graphic representation becomes
a map. As in the admittedly exaggerated example of the circle with the word
“moon,” an image may also cease being perceptible as a map.13
My insistence on the tension between naturalistic and schematic repre-
sentations certainly has to do with the relevant theoretical problems that it
signals. Such problems are related to the very question of what the history of
cartography is the history of. But there is also a more mundane concern: the
scholarship on moon maps has been weighing up this tension for decades, and
I have no reason to neglect the importance that so many writers have accorded
to it, tacitly or explicitly. Lunar mapmakers have themselves been struggling
with the seemingly divergent demands of naturalism and “mapness.”
A few of the earliest post-Galilean, telescopic moon images perfectly dis-
play the inherent difficulties in the balancing act between naturalism and
more “abstract” ways of representing the lunar surface. Figures 4a–d are cases
in point: all of them appeared in books published by different Jesuit astrono-
mers, who took an early interest in the possibilities opened up by the newly
available optical instrument and in the consequences of the new observations
to long-standing cosmological debates. The four images present a challenge:
naturalism is definitely off the table, but do we modern viewers perceive them
as “maps”? For their authors they were undoubtedly nothing more than visual
aids to buttress textual arguments.14 Ewen Whitaker, one of the most prolific

13  Christian Jacob has in passing suggested a distinction that seems to have gone unnoticed,
but merits being pursued further: “One should probably introduce a distinction between
views and maps, the former being an attempt to give a vision of the moon as seen through
the telescope, and through various pictorial means, such as perspective and shading ef-
fects, while the map is the graphic transformation of vision into a schematic drawing,
with semiological conventions” (Jacob 2002, 166).
14  I will leave it open to the reader’s consideration whether these images could be profitably
treated as “cartifacts” (Post 2001; Smits 2009).
18 Haddad

twentieth-century writers on the history of lunar maps, basically discards all

four images as “very low-quality sketches” (Whitaker 1989, 125). Jesuit historian
Omer Van de Vyver refers to Figure 4a as a “drawing,” including it under the
heading “The First Attempts to Map the Moon;” he is careful not to ever call
the image a map. As to Figures 4b–c, he discards them as “mere schematic
sketches,” immediately before starting a section with the title “Real Moon
Maps” (Van de Vyver 1971a, 70). However, in another article published the same
year, the author openly treats our Figure 4a as a map, without the need for any
further qualification (Van de Vyver 1971b, 93–94), in the same way as J. Classen
(1969, 82), Zdenek Kopal (1969, 66; see also Kopal and Carder 1974, 8), or Antoni
Paluzie i Borrell (1967, 224).
So maybe in the end it really is up to the viewer to decide whether to call a
given representation a map, contrary to what I claimed before? My view is that
the instability we found in the treatment accorded to the specimen in Figure 4a
is the best indicator that the image itself is in no way deprived of performative
agency. And I have already fully recognized that the effects of this agency are
in no way controllable or predictable. After all, of the four early Jesuit moon
images included in astronomical books, the one in Figure 4a is undeniably the
most densely covered with semiotic indices of “mapness:” besides ostensible
lettering, it makes typical use of cartographic engraving procedures such as
stippling and hachuring in order to internally differentiate the representation
space, and even presents something reminiscent of topographical sloping.
This reminiscence of techniques and visual clues characteristic of terrestrial
maps is a very important point, to be later explored in detail. At this stage,
I would just like to underline the fact that moon maps are happily difficult to
“judge,” for with the exception of a few specialized writers, one usually looks
at these maps without any implicit term of comparison of what a “good” speci-
men should look like. Such standards are frequently conjured up when one
contemplates terrestrial maps of old, eliciting understandings of map history
that are haunted by the specters of progress and precision, which so frequently
must be challenged anew. At the same time, however, the very prejudices we
carry from our familiarity with terrestrial maps become productive in mak-
ing sense of the “mapness” of lunar maps: they were and are perceived as
maps not because their makers wanted this, nor because they had a number
of visual and material features that forced them to be of necessity classed as
maps, and less yet because viewers simply decided they were maps. Moon
maps became so precisely because they participated in cartographic cultures
of practice, product, and reception overwhelmingly dominated and shaped
by terrestrial maps. In order to be intelligible, they had to appeal to practices
of production and representation established first and foremost in the realm
Maps of the Moon 19

4a 4b

4c 4d

FIGURE 4 Four depictions of the moon that appeared in books published by Jesuit
­astronomers in the two decades following Galileo’s first observations. They were
always used to make the point, developed in the texts, that the telescope had
revealed the surface relief.

4a Christoph Scheiner, Disquisitiones mathematicae (Ingolstad, 1614), page 58.

COURTESY ETH-BIBLIOTHEK ZÜRICH (Rar 4325, DOI 10.3931/e-rara-1319)
4b Charles Malapert, Oratio … de nouis Belgici Telescopij phaenomenis (Douai, 1620?),
page 32.
COURTESY UNIVERSITEITSBIBLIOTHEEK GENT (CC BY-SA 4.0)

4c Giuseppe Biancani, Sphaera Mundi (Bologna, 1620), page 150.

COURTESY ETH-BIBLIOTHEK ZÜRICH (Rar 2371, DOI 10.3931/e-rara-15464)
4d Cristoforo Borri, Collecta Astronomica (Lisbon, 1631), page 146.
COURTESY BIBLIOTECA GERAL DA UNIVERSIDADE DE COIMBRA, BY KIND
PERMISSION OF A. E. MAIA DO AMARAL
20 Haddad

of terrestrial maps. Also, lunar cartography has always depended on unstated

“metageographies” that dictate what is or is not possible on the physical space
of the moon, what is important or irrelevant, and what hierarchies must be
attended to. Metageographies structure the perception and representation of
spatial relations (Lewis and Wigen 1997), and, as we will have the opportunity
to see, they represent the ultimate way in which terrestrial cartography has
always conditioned its lunar counterpart.

2 Making It Visible: Bringing the Moon Down to the Earth

As outlined in the introduction, the aim in this part is to explore in greater de-
tail the origins of the “naturalistic tradition” of depicting the moon, which are
inseparable from the origin of telescopic observational practices themselves.
Galileo Galilei will be the focus of attention, with our gaze once again turning
to Figure 1. After this discussion, I will propose an experiment in assembling
a visual series of naturalistic moons. The aim is to allow for some measure of
visual discourse too, restraining the textual action.

2.1 The Telescope Enters the Stage

Galileo Galilei began to observe the moon and other celestial objects with the
help of a telescope in the later part of 1609, and rushed so much to publish
his findings that his landmark book Sidereus Nuncius appeared in Venice in
March 1610.15 Galileo’s moon, drawn by himself and appearing in five engrav-
ings in the book, is impressive for its textured three-dimensionality (Figure 1).
It has a very marked relief, underscored by the mastery of chiaroscuro tech-
niques that Galileo had acquired at the Florentine Accademia del Disegno in
his youth (Panofsky 1954). There is an interesting tension operating in this
image: on the one hand, Galileo’s rendering of the moon really seems to follow
conventions of naturalistic representation, inasmuch as it depicts something
that appears to conform to sensory experience (Winkler and Van Helden 1992).
Like a portrait or a landscape picture, the image conveys an illusion of visual
immediacy, or, at the very least, the feeling that the only mediation taking place
is that of reduction. “The engravings in Sidereus Nuncius are the first printed

15  Galilean scholarship is too vast to be cited here, let alone reviewed. Works on his depic-
tions of the moon, and, more generally, his visual practices of representation of heavenly
phenomena also abound, but a few essential readings would be Panofsky (1954), Righini
(1975), Gingerich (1975), Whitaker (1978), Cohen (1982), Edgerton (1984), Winkler and Van
Helden (1992), Reeves (1997), Bredekamp (2000; 2007), and Jacob (2011).
Maps of the Moon 21

images of the lunar surface governed by the principles of mimesis, perspective,

and pictorial illusion,” asserts Christian Jacob (2011, 613). On the other hand, no
one really sees that image with his or her own eyes upon looking at the moon.
Galileo’s lunar depiction thus represents not what is actually seen, but what
might credibly be seen. There is an obvious leap of faith involved in this: the
naturalism of a portrait or landscape stems from an appeal to verisimilitude.
Even if I have never met the sitter of a portrait, I have learned to think the vi-
sual impression the picture causes on me resembles what I experience when
looking at any real person. But with the moon it is different, since the viewer
cannot recur to any analogous optical experience in order to ascertain that
the depiction conceivably captures the visual impression of an existing object.
Obviously, the heart of the matter is the novelty represented by the tele-
scope as an aid to the eye, and Galileo has to rely on textually hinting at his
own trustworthiness as a witness to the image. But then we must notice that,
in reality, Galileo’s moon engravings show more than what he could see with
his telescope—actually, they represent an imagined moon, as it would be seen
from an impossibly small distance. Galileo deliberately exaggerates the dimen-
sions of major features, in order to achieve a dramatic effect and illustrate his
main textual point: he argues that the moon has a rugged landscape, in contra-
diction to the Aristotelian theory that ascribed to it a smooth surface (van Gent
and Van Helden 2007, 126).16 Galileo even estimates the height of the “moun-
tains of the moon” (Cohen 1982).
Galileo’s charge against Aristotelianism does not go unnoticed: so much
so that, as early as 1611, Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino, one of the most power-
ful church prelates of the time, tasked a group of Jesuit astronomers at the
Roman College with assessing Galileo’s observations. Bellarmino asked, among
other things, whether the astronomers “agree (…) that the moon has a rugged
and uneven surface,” that is, whether Galileo’s statements (either textual or
pictorial) are to be trusted. In their reply, sent less than a week after the cardi-
nal’s request, and signed jointly by Christoph Clavius, Christoph Grienberger,
Odo van Maelcote and Giovanni Paolo Lembo, the priests affirmed that “no
one can deny the great unevenness of the moon, although it seems more

16  Contrary to a view that is held even in scholarly circles (e.g., Bredekamp 2000, 425),
perfect smoothness was not the only acceptable idea about the moon with currency in
Galileo’s time: “These [ideas] included [the moon] being (a) a mirror, reflecting the ter-
restrial oceans and continents; (b) a polished, translucent crystalline sphere; (c) a body
of condensed fire, etc.; and (d) a terrestrial type of spherical body with seas, mountains,
valleys, plains, etc.” (Whitaker 1989, 122). In fact, Galileo had a particular interest in pro-
moting a version of this last view (d), which, although not really espoused by a great many
astronomers, was nevertheless well known to them.
22 Haddad

probable to Father Clavius that it is not that the surface is uneven, but that
the lunar body is not uniformly dense, having denser parts and more rarefied
parts” (Favaro 1929–1939, vol. 11, 87–88 and 92–93). In other words, apart from
the aging Clavius, all the others see the same thing as Galileo.
Galileo’s moon drawings show no hint of concern with identifying features
on the image itself, much less of a full-fledged toponymy. His is a relieved
moon, not as in topographical maps, of course, but nevertheless definitely not
smooth. Galileo has no interest whatsoever in ascribing names to the surface
features he represents, because his interest lies elsewhere, on the cosmological
argument. This is not to say that he was not aware of the power that naming
things after powerful people has in the court society he lived in. On the con-
trary, with a view to obtaining the patronage from the Medici, he was quick in
calling the satellites of Jupiter “Medicean stars.” In fact, he had already dedi-
cated the Sidereus Nuncius to Cosimo II, patriarch of the Florentine family.
Instead of giving names of important patrons to features on a moon whose
possible heavenly perfection he was striving to disprove, the “new stars” he
discovered orbiting Jupiter seemed more fitting for baptism (see Biagioli 1993).

2.2 Assembling Naturalistic Depictions: a Visual Exercise

Depictions of the moon partaking in the aspiration to naturalism came down
through the ages, from Galileo onwards. By “aspiration to naturalism” I do not
mean anything like “precision” or the projective mirroring of spatial relations.
Indeed, Galileo already inaugurated this tradition distorting his drawings. What
I have in mind is the intention of verisimilitude that such images share. This is
pivoted on the guaranteed impossibility of most viewers verifying whether the
representation is “really” true-to-nature (Daston and Galison 2007)—instead,
they just have to “believe” in the representation’s claim to naturalism.
Thus, without further historical or formal considerations, I would like to
take this brief Section to invite an exercise on the formation of a “visual series.”
I take my inspiration here from Carla Lois’s (2015) proposal to construct what
she calls a “cartographic series,” that is, tentative groupings of cartographic ar-
tifacts that are brought together due to some perceived shared characteristic.17
Such series can be assembled, reassembled, and dismantled. While they are
in place, they allow for a synoptic gaze of whatever commonality one wanted
to highlight. However, series are unstable: they may be criticized, remade,

17  Lois in turn took inspiration from Aby Warburg’s general treatment of images (not only
cartographic ones) through coupling and decoupling, approximation and distancing.
This is why I feel justified in proposing to readers a visual series of objects of whose
“mapness” I am confessedly uncertain, but which are, in any case, images.
Maps of the Moon 23

5a 5b

5c 5d

FIGURE 5 A visual series presenting four naturalistic depictions of the moon

produced over the course of more than three centuries.
5a Engraving of the full moon drawn by Claude Mellan, by commission
from Pierre Gassendi and Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, 1637.
COURTESY THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

5b Engraving by Jean Patigny for Giovanni Domenico Cassini of the Paris

Royal Observatory, 1679.
COURTESY BRITISH LIBRARY

5c Stipple engraving of the moon under direct sunlight, by John Russell,

after his own earlier drawings and micrometric measurements, 1805.
COURTESY WELLCOME COLLECTION (CC BY)

5d Remote-sense image overlaid by hand painting, made by Donald Davis

and Don Wilhelms for the U.S. Geological Survey, 1971.
SOURCE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
24 Haddad

or even undone by the viewer, who is in a position to question or reject the

governing principle.
Any series is thus an open-ended exercise on the “pedagogy of images,” and
I will leave to readers’ own judgments what may be accomplished by the series
presented here in Figures 5a–d. The images are, first, one of the engravings
that resulted from a collaboration between Pierre Gassendi, Nicolas-Claude
Fabri de Peiresc, and Claude Mellan, in the 1630s; second, the engraving made
by Jean Patigny for Giovanni Domenico Cassini’s Paris Royal Observatory, in
the 1670s; then, an early-nineteenth century moon rendering by painter and
instrument maker John Russell; and, finally, a Space Age lunar image, prepared
by the U.S. Geological Survey.

3 Making It Legible: Taking the Earth up to the Moon

The naturalistic tradition that we have just considered betrays a double ges-
ture: learning to put/see on paper what was seen on the telescope. It starts
with eyes turned upward, and ends with eyes turned downward. In this part
I will consider the exact opposite: how some people decided to learn how to
see on the telescope what was seen on paper, inverting the direction of the
gaze—first the “map,” then the “terrain.”

3.1 Colonial Reflections on the Moon

A few months before Galileo started to direct his telescope to the skies, the
Englishman Thomas Harriot was already doing exactly that. Unlike Galileo,
however, Harriot never published a word about what he saw, although he left
notebooks and had discussions with correspondents. The moon was also his
earliest telescopic interest, but the graphic renderings he left of what he saw
are strikingly different from Galileo’s. Besides some hurried sketches in 1609,
the most detailed moon image drawn by Harriot dates from 1610, after he had
already read the Sidereus Nuncius (Bloom 1978), reproduced here in Figure 6.
The absence of a clearly depicted relief is most arresting, in direct contrast
with Galileo’s depiction. One may be tempted to see a map, emphasizing the
representation and identification of large “coastlines” that separate lighter and
darker regions. What we would come to call craters are flat circles or ellipses
scattered across the surface. The numbers and letters correspond to textual
notes Harriot took on the course of the observations, describing the position-
ing of specific line shapes, such as triangles or straight segments (Whitaker
1999, 17)—the kind of notes we can imagine a mapmaker would take during
Maps of the Moon 25

FIGURE 6 Thomas Harriot carried out telescopic observations of the moon

from 1609 to 1612, registering them in a large notebook with
textual notes, calculations, and several ­ink-and-pen sketches and
drawings (Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office,
Chichester, U.K., HMC 241 IX). The drawing shown here (fol. 30) is
the most detailed of all and includes numbered references to notes
in which Harriot tries to describe in words what he saw.
COURTESY MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE HISTORY OF
SCIENCE (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE), BY KIND PERMISSION OF LORD
EGREMONT

a reconnaissance mission with limited time, as an aide-memoire for a future

chart. The same notes speak of “peninsulas,” “islands,” and “promontories”
(Alexander 1998, 362).
It is no wonder that before drawing this moon, Harriot had served as a car-
tographer to Sir Walter Raleigh’s expeditions to North America and Guyana
in the last two decades of the sixteenth century, and his main experience was
precisely in drawing maps of coastlines, not topographical charts (Alexander
1998; Pumfrey 2009; Nicholls 2012). Harriot’s friend Sir William Lower observed
26 Haddad

the moon with a telescope about the same time, and on February 6, 1610,
he wrote something to Harriot that says much of their shared perceptions
and references: “[the image] looks like unto the description of coasts, in the
Dutch books of voyages” (quoted in Alexander 1998, 351). In fact, writes Amir
Alexander, “[w]hatever [Harriot’s] precise beliefs [about the physical nature of
the moon], it is clear that [he] mapped the face of the moon as if he were chart-
ing oceans and continents,” adding that Harriot “was outlining the coastlines
of the moon” (Alexander 1998, 361–362, emphasis in the original).
Although Harriot never published his observations and drawings of the
moon, he epitomizes a specific sensibility that others would independently
develop in the next few decades, at odds with the tradition inaugurated by
Galileo’s published images and arguments. We can say that a moon will appear
by cartographers alongside a moon by (natural) philosophers or astronomers.
The latter will frequently opt to represent the lunar disk on the waxing or wan-
ing phases, during which the oblique illumination from the sun enhances the
perception of ruggedness. When they take part on cosmological arguments,
even those images that clearly deviate from naturalistic conventions usually
depict the moon on an intermediary phase. Such is the case with the lunar
images in Jesuit astronomers’ books we discussed before (Figures 4a–d). Like
Harriot’s, cartographers’ renderings of the moon, on the other hand, are gen-
erally of the full body, when perpendicular solar illumination blurs the relief,
enhances the large divisions between light and dark, and fills the surface with
bright spots.

3.2 Non Sufficit Orbis: Claiming the Moon for a King, or a Politics of
Lunar Cartography
In 1644, Michael Florent van Langren, cosmographer and mathematician to
the king of Spain in Flanders, published at his own expense a scant booklet of
13 pages, under the title La Verdadera Longitud por Mar y Tierra: Demostrada
y Dedicada a su Majestad Catholica Philippo IV. On the very first line he an-
nounces that the purpose of the work is to inform His Majesty of some grave
matters pertaining to the problem of establishing longitudes, and redress a
great injustice. After stating that his father and grandfather had made “a pro-
fession of the arts, such as astronomy and geography,” and that the former had
already held the position of royal cosmographer for 26 years in the Flemish
States, Van Langren comes to his chief purpose: to make it known to the
monarch that, “having exercised himself on those arts and discovered things
hitherto unknown,” he had “found something considerable in the matter”
of establishing the true longitude at sea and land (Van Langren 1644, 3). He
claimed nothing less than having found a complete solution to the problem
Maps of the Moon 27

of establishing the longitude of any site on the planet, including a ship sailing
the oceans.
Born in Amsterdam in 1598, Van Langren had learned mapmaking from his
father, Arnold Florent van Langren, who was himself the son of another suc-
cessful cartographer and globe maker. The family was originally from Utrecht
and Amsterdam, but as Roman Catholics, they moved to Belgium around 1600.
Arnold van Langren quickly became archducal “spherographer,” in keeping
with the tradition of mapmaking privileges the family already enjoyed in the
Netherlands, more than once challenged by Jodocus Hondius. In 1628, Arnold
van Langren would receive the task from Balthasar Moretus of preparing a re-
vised edition of Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, certainly bringing wider
recognition to his already profitable globe and map business (Keuning 1956;
Van der Krogt 1995).
In the 1644 text, Van Langren claimed that in 1621 he had already unraveled
that “great secret” of finding longitude, and around 1625 had told about it to
the archduchess Isabel Clara Eugenia, daughter of Philip II and governor of
the Spanish Netherlands in the name of her grandnephew Philip IV. From an
early age Van Langren had been a client of Isabel’s inner circle of patronage.
Throughout the 1620s and 1630s, the archduchess would commission impor-
tant undertakings from father and son, such as maps of the new canals that fur-
rowed Flanders, and ambitious projects for a port at Mardyck, near Dunkirk,
to house the Spanish fleets increasingly harassed by the Dutch on the North
Sea. To the handsome income Michael van Langren secured with the maps,
engineering projects, and associated privileges, was added royal favor, start-
ing in 1633, amounting to an annual pension of almost five thousand florins
(Montucla 1802, 506).
La Verdadera Longitud offers a description of previous, and, we are told,
unsuccessful attempts to uncover the secret of longitude and, no less im-
portant, claim the prize of six thousand ducats that Philip III had promised
back in 1598 to whomever got it right. Van Langren wrote that all the past
proposals were unreliable, giving, as an example, the 12 different values they
gave to the longitude of Rome in relation to the meridian of Toledo. Only Van
Langren’s own method could bring order to this chaos, according to his claim,
and the moon played the main role in his approach. Zealously, he does not
enter into details; instead, the text ends with an encrypted paragraph where
the method is supposedly presented, along with a vow to disclose the cipher
if the king considers that Van Langren deserves the prize. He ends the book
asserting that eternal glory will befall the monarch in whose honor, and under
whose protection such a momentous achievement is attained (Van Langren
1644, 10–12).
28 Haddad

In fact, long before the publication of La Verdadera Longitud Van Langren

was trying to claim the longitude prize with his lunar method. Failure to secure
the prize is the real reason that led to his publishing the booklet. We know
that back in 1626 Van Langren first asked the archduchess to financially sup-
port him on a trip to Madrid so that he could present some “astronomical and
hydrographical tables” at the court, to which she replied with a request that
Van Langren “and his father first make a map of the coasts of Flanders” (docu-
ments quoted in Bosmans 1903, 135). In 1628 he petitioned once again, now
expressly saying he wanted to uncover, in Madrid, his “invention of longitude”
(Van Langren 1644, 8). This time he may have shown Isabel a hand-drawn
version of the central piece of his method—a map with place names (Houzeau
1852, 507).
In order to judge Van Langren’s claims, Archduchess Isabel sought the opin-
ion of two eminent scholars: the priest and lawyer Govaart Wendelin, who
was at the time the most famous astronomer in her domains, and Erycius
Puteanus, royal counselor, historian, and professor of Latin philology at the
University of Louvain, a position formerly held by his famed teacher Justus
Lipsius (Bosmans 1903). Both scholars held the “invention” in high regard, but
it was already 1631 when Van Langren finally set foot in Madrid, carrying a letter
of introduction signed by the archduchess, begging the king to accord him “a
treatment as dignified and liberal as the rarity and usefulness of the invention”
(Van Langren 1644, 9).
In Madrid, Wendelin and Puteanus’s estimation of Van Langren’s method
was upheld by renowned professors of mathematics at the Imperial College,
in particular the Flemish Jesuit Jean-Charles de La Faille, at the time royal
cosmographer and councilor. However, in the 1644 booklet Van Langren says
he was the victim of a treacherous maneuver by an envious royal secretary in
Madrid, who prevented him from presenting the invention to the Council of
the Indies, and he eventually had to return to Brussels. More than ten years
later he wanted to see that injustice redressed, and this had been his aim in
writing the book in the first place.
Although Van Langren never published the details of his method for find-
ing longitudes (in fact, methods, as he claimed he had found more than one,
all of them based on observations of the moon), we can reconstruct with rea-
sonable certainty what he had in mind. The main idea was to measure the
angular separation between some notable features on the moon’s surface and
certain stars, during a full moon, or to measure the precise times when such
features became visible or fell into obscurity during the waxing and waning
phases (in other words, the times when the terminator reached these forma-
tions). The measured angles or times would then be compared to predictions
Maps of the Moon 29

that Van Langren claimed he was able make with great precision, valid for
some set meridian on earth. The difference between measured and predicted
values would finally translate into the difference in longitude between the lo-
cation where the observations took place and the meridian of reference.
This method was strictly impracticable. The required measurements, es-
pecially of the times of illumination or darkening of surface features, sim-
ply could not be made because the terminator is far from sharp, even with a
telescope. The full-moon measurements amounted to the well-known lunar
distance method, but they were impossible to execute at that time aboard a
ship. And, in any case, the required lunar tables would not be available for an-
other hundred years, and we have no reason to believe Van Langren was able
to calculate them. Be that as it may, the proposal obviously asked for a map
showing details of the lunar face, and, on top of that, a practical system for
identifying such details on the map itself and on the tables—a toponymy, that
is. It was for this map and the associated toponymy that he had great designs
and expectations.
Although Van Langren left Madrid unable to secure the recognition he
sought for his method, he got Philip IV interested in the lunar map required
by the proposal. Indeed, in a letter from May 1633, the king addressed the arch-
duchess in the following terms:

Madam my good aunt, Michael Florent van Langren, my mathematician

therein [Belgium], informed me of having discovered on the sky some
luminaries (…) through which one may observe the longitude and dis-
tance of terrestrial locations, and redress geography, and that since such
luminaries are hitherto unknown and unnamed, one might bring them
to light under the general title luminaria austriaca philippica, and give
them particular names of qualified persons (…) Your Highness will have
[the matter] examined by knowledgeable persons, in order to put it in
practice, in the way most fitting to my greatness, which I may use to give
names to said stars.
quoted in GACHARD 1845, 261

The “luminaries” or “stars” the king is mentioning are the moon’s surface
features that Van Langren wanted to employ in his longitude determination
method (either to measure their angular separation from stars or the times
when they entered or left darkness). The king’s words left no doubt as to the
importance Van Langren ascribed to the naming of these lunar places, which
were to be the “Austrian Philipian luminaries,” after all (“Austrian” being an
overt reference to the house of Habsburg).
30 Haddad

Thus, even though the Council did not examine Van Langren’s proposal
(or, what is more probable, did not find it deserving of the prize, as it ultimately
could not solve the longitude problem), Van Langren would not give up on his
pretensions to the prize, since the king himself seemed to be on his side. By
the time he published La Verdadera Longitud, he was engaged in feverish cor-
respondence with Wendelin and Puteanus about the map, and, at the same
time, was requesting privileges from the Privy Council in Brussels. He feared
others might be on the way to publishing a lunar map with place names, which
would strip him of all priority. More catastrophically, a map from another au-
thor could mean that Philip might end up not being glorified on the moon.

3.3 A Moon Map We All Agree to Call a Map

Van Langren went on and, in April 1645, finally published his moon map,
entitled Plenilunii / Lumina Austriaca Philippica (Figure 7).18 Archduchess
Isabel was long deceased, but he now counted on the support of yet an-
other powerful patron, this time the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, a
Portuguese nobleman who remained faithful to Philip after Portugal left the
united realm in 1640. The lumina of the title are the “luminaries” we have
already mentioned; at the same time, the Latin word can be taken to mean
the King’s own lights or even his eyes. The visual language is reminiscent of
Harriot’s image, and is decidedly different from those by Galileo (Figure 1) or
Gassendi-Peiresc-Mellan (Figure 5a): what matters is the great contrasts and
the isolated accidents, not the relief per se; the latter is only suggested by the
standardized shading that is applied to the craters. It is not quite a topogra-
pher’s map, but that of a cartographer mostly interested in large contrasts,
edges, boundaries, and, above all, names. The rich toponymy serves indexically
as a marker of the nature of Van Langren’s moon representation: it “is” a map,
even though there are no discernible grids, scales, or an identifiable underlying
projection—in other words, it is an “eyeball” representation. Of course, terres-
trial maps may perfectly lack all of those features as well.
The toponyms project, on the face of the moon, a fantastic European
geopolitics, with an immense Philippine Ocean, an Austrian Sea, a Hill of
Ferdinand III; in fact, the map shows no less than 325 place names. There is
room for popes, kings, princes, emperors; mathematicians, astronomers and
painters are honored. We find place names in honor of Innocent X, Louis XIV,
Charles I of England, or Christina of Sweden. In addition to the ocean, Philip IV
is destined for another accident as well as Archduchess Isabel, Prince Baltasar

18  The map is extant in three different engraving states. There is also a hand drawn version
that Van Langren presented to the Privy Council, a later edition from 1670, and a forgery
(Whitaker 1999, 37–42).
Maps of the Moon 31

FIGURE 7 Van Langren’s 1645 map Plenilunii / Lumina Austriaca Philippica, engraved by
himself, is the first published chart of the moon including a very detailed
nomenclature. In the lengthy inscription, Van Langren narrates the process
that culminated in the map, ­announces he intends to publish a complete lunar
atlas, and claims priority and exclusive privileges for himself, appealing to King
Philip IV’s protection.
SOURCE: BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE DE FRANCE (Département Cartes et
plans, GE D-17925)
32 Haddad

Carlos, and Queen Anne of Austria. Major secretaries find their place: Haro,
Aytona, Mazarin, Arundel. There is no lack of Galileo, Copernicus, Tycho
Brahe, and Van Langren himself, as well as his friends De La Faille, Wendelin
or Puteanus. In addition, the moon of Van Langren accommodates moral vir-
tues: Land of Temperance, Wisdom, Dignity, Work. Van Langren offers Philip IV
much more than a purported instrument for the practical determination of
longitudes: he offers, on the mirror of the moon, the image of royal power
over a world beyond this world (Bouza 2008). It was not gratuitous, after all,
that Philip’s royal grandfather on occasion employed the motto Non sufficit
orbis—the world is not enough—, whereas Philip IV himself was known as the
“planet-king” (Kagan 2005; Pereda and Marías 2002).
The story of how Van Langren came up with the hundreds of names he gave
to the moon places shows the clear understanding he had of maps as artifacts
with elevated symbolic value as well as their central role in claims of territorial
sovereignty over any place—even the moon’s surface.19 Moreover, the story
highlights the importance of cartographic priority to buttress both mapmak-
ers’ leverage on the symbolic value of their products and their patrons’ am-
bitions of territorial control. For 15 years or more before publishing the map,
Van Langren had been in close connection with Wendelin and Puteanus, the
first supporters of his longitude method. Now, in the early months of 1645,
the recurring theme of their correspondence is the best name to ascribe to
each lunar feature. In particular Puteanus seems to consider the enterprise as
much his as Van Langren’s, suggesting more and more place names in each
letter he sends, to the general agreement of Van Langren. The humanist of
Louvain is thrilled with the prospect of baptizing the whole face of the moon,
fully realizing the symbolic power that comes with the ability to name places
on a map—particularly when the places to be named lay on unclaimed terri-
tory, like the moon’s surface. Van Langren provides Puteanus with drawings
that show new details every time, creating the very space to be named, and
Puteanus reacts with considerations of importance and dignity and decorum
in order to suggest the most appropriate names for each place. His vision be-
trays a metageography that places higher value on centers than on margins,
on large expanses than on limited areas, besides a thoroughly gendered and
socially stratified view of human affairs. For several months after the map’s
publication, Puteanus’s letters still revolve around the map, only that this

19  See Pineda de Ávila (2017, 154–167) and Montgomery (1999, 157–168) for thorough anal-
yses of Van Langren’s naming project and the cultural resonances of his nomenclature
scheme.
Maps of the Moon 33

time the subject is not who is on the map, but who will receive a copy of it,
courtesy of Puteanus. Thus, we get to know that he sent copies to Constantijn
Huygens, Isaac Vossius, Cassiano dal Pozzo, and perhaps even Pope Innocent X
(see Bosmans 1903 for a selection of the correspondence).
As Scott Montgomery points out, it is the dense “semiotic environment” of
Van Langren’s moon, including the toponymy, which invites viewers to call
the engraving a map, or better, to see it as a map. Van Langren’s image “is car-
tographic because of its dense textuality, because it is surrounded, framed,
nested, and invaded by writing in exactly the same way as were mapped regions
of the Earth” (Montgomery 1999, 157). Thus, the product extracts its legibility
as a map, its “mapness,” from the hybridization of text and image. Moreover,
the visual part itself does not function as “an ‘observation,’ an actual visual
portrait of the lunar surface” (ibidem). Here, Montgomery is implying that the
intended function of the artifact adds to its identification or intelligibility as a
map: “[Van Langren’s] images were specifically intended to solve the problem
of longitude. They are true maps, stylized plots of features across a flat plane,
unburdened by the demands of naturalism. They are cartographic abstractions
whose ‘science’ exists in the accuracy of placement and size of individual fea-
tures, not in their depiction” (ibidem). Of course, as I have argued, being an in-
strument for determining longitudes is second to the map’s symbolic function
as a royal gift—and this only places it even more firmly within contemporary
cartographic culture.
The lengthy Latin inscription beneath the engraving serves the function
of “surrounding” or “framing” the image with something that points to the
world of maps, even if one cannot or does not read it, but just glances at the
heavy textual block. If we pay attention to the words, however, yet another
layer of cartographic texture is revealed. At the outset, Van Langren claims his
is a geographical undertaking: “The lunar globe is the most familiar celestial
body, however the most unknown geographically (…) [The king] allowed me to
name this selenographical description, or lunar geography, as Lumina Austriaca
Philippica.”20 Thus, Van Langren claims he is not doing anything different from
what geographers do when they describe the globe of the earth. He goes on to
talk about islands and mountains, and the naming scheme. Importantly, Van
Langren reveals something telling:

We already possess thirty images of the waxing and waning phases of

the moon, which follow each other in incessant succession. We distinctly

20  This and the subsequent quotations come from the Latin inscription under the map.
34 Haddad

indicate on these images all the details of the lunar surface, such as the
islands and the mountain summits. Often distant from the continents,
these features appear instantaneously while the moon is waning and dis-
appear suddenly when it is waxing. They offer the best way for finding
longitudes, and can be employed on almost any day.

Now we can appreciate the true breadth of Van Langren’s cartographic proj-
ect: he wanted to produce a veritable atlas of the moon, the published broad-
sheet being just a way to ascertain his priority in the attribution of names and,
evidently, a gift he expected the king to reciprocate by offering support for the
larger undertaking.
Van Langren was able to secure all the privileges he required from the Privy
Council in Brussels. The inscription on the map ends with a clear threat: “By
royal decree, all are forbidden to make any changes to the names on this figure,
under penalty of indignity.” No one paid attention to the prohibition, and all
places on the moon were to be baptized anew not once, but twice over the next
few years.

4 Time Concreted

The first maps of the moon that are specifically, unmistakably of the moon
are the ones published by Johannes Hevelius in 1647. What is special about
them is not that they are of the moon but the fact that they face the problem
of time head-on, grabbing time and putting it on paper. The impermanence of
the face of the moon is not swept aside, but, quite to the contrary, it is rendered
concretely on map space itself. After analyzing the “Hevelian way,” I discuss at
some length an interesting sub-genre of lunar cartography, which is the eclipse
map. Not only Hevelius’s eclipse maps, but also Cassini’s are discussed and
shown to be functional, instrumental maps. Finally, I suggest viewing the fig-
ure who is invariably presented as Hevelius’s selenographic nemesis, the Jesuit
Giovanni Battista Riccioli, as a Hevelian at heart.

4.1 Moonstruck by Selenographia

Johannes Hevelius’s Selenographia: sive, Lunae Descriptio appeared in 1647, in
Gdansk. A massive in-folio tome, the book ran to some 500 densely printed
pages in Latin. It was Hevelius’s first book, and he took care of every aspect of
the process of publication, acting as his own editor, draftsman, and engraver.
Only printing was committed to a third party, but Hevelius paid for it, retain-
ing full control of his debut in the Republic of Letters. Financing the print run
Maps of the Moon 35

was certainly not a problem for this wealthy brewer and soon-to-be city mag-
istrate in his native Gdansk. Born there in 1611, Hevelius had spent the early
1630s studying and traveling in the Netherlands, England, and France (where
he made the acquaintance of Gassendi). After returning to his hometown,
Hevelius decided to build a private observatory on the roof of his own house.21
Perhaps this self-reliance and the fact that astronomy was always circum-
scribed to Hevelius’s domestic space help us understand why, unlike so many
books of the time, Selenographia is not dedicated to anybody: Hevelius is at
once the author, financial backer, protagonist, and guarantor of the work. Even
Galileo, who adorns the allegorical frontispiece beside the Arab astronomer
Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), symbolizing the importance of the senses for as-
tronomy, is disparaged by Hevelius. The latter wonders that what he considers
to be the appallingly low quality of the moon drawings in the Sidereus Nuncius
can only be explained if Galileo was either a careless observer, was unskilled
in draftsmanship, or had a very bad telescope (Hevelius 1647, 205). In fact, po-
sitioning himself as more careful and attentive to detail than Galileo is part of
Hevelius’s bid for his readers’ trust.
Selenographia is at the same time a monument to observational astronomy
and to the power of visual representation. It has 111 full-page figures, includ-
ing three foldout maps, plus two-dozen illustrations embedded in the printed
text, all of them copperplate engravings. With the exception of a handful,
every image in the book was drawn and engraved by Hevelius himself, and
he never loses an opportunity to remind the reader of this, from the “Author
sculpsit” almost invariably inscribed on a corner of the illustrations to textual
­reiterations of his ultimate responsibility for the images and everything else
in the book. The index includes precise instructions regarding the placement
of the f­ull-page figures, and Hevelius addresses bookbinders in order to pro-
vide details on how they must handle these sheets (Hevelius 1647, last page of
index).
The importance of the printed image for Hevelius’s endeavor in Seleno­
graphia and, far more importantly, to a far-reaching reconfiguration of early-
modern astronomy as a whole was forcefully demonstrated by Mary G. Winkler
and Albert van Helden. Against a received view of Hevelius as a dilettante, al-
beit talented astronomer who contributed nothing original to the field, Winkler
and van Helden argue that he was responsible for nothing less than the estab-
lishment of a “visual language” that was bound to be almost immediately taken

21  Scholarship on Hevelius’s life and work (of which Selenographia is but his first produc-
tion) has been steadily growing over the last few years. I would recommend, as a most
up-to-date starting point, the collection edited by Kremer and Włodarczyk (2013).
36 Haddad

up by all practitioners of astronomy. This happened so quickly that the new

visual language became thoroughly naturalized, to the point that its indebted-
ness to Selenographia was all but completely lost. In Winkler and Van Helden’s
words,

[i]n the second half of the seventeenth century pictures of heavenly phe-
nomena observed through the telescope became common, and these pic-
tures spoke for themselves. In fact, they sometimes contained information
that was not explained until much later. (…) Hevelius’s authority flowed
from his copious use of visual evidence whose reliability he was able to
impress upon the reader. Yet, by the end of the century Selenographia
was already obsolete. As others discovered that some of his observations
were in error, the influence of Hevelius’s work in telescopic astronomy
waned, and by the time of his death it had been superseded. His method
of visual communication had, however, by then become an accepted part
of astronomy and science in general. Indeed, it had become so common
that this achievement of Hevelius had become invisible.
WINKLER AND VAN HELDEN 1993, 116

Contrary to what one might be tempted to believe from the remarkable suc-
cess of the Sidereus Nuncius, up to the mid-seventeenth century, astronomy
had almost no reliance on depicting celestial phenomena. Pictures, here nar-
rowly understood as naturalistic renderings of observation, played close to no
role in the communication of astronomical discoveries, in arguments in favor
of their reality, or in reasoning about phenomena (Winkler and Van Helden
1992, note 2 and passim). Indeed, with the exception of the five moon illus-
trations in the Sidereus Nuncius, plus a few images of sunspots on the solar
disk from his important 1612 work on the subject, even Galileo never again em-
ployed pictures (in that specific sense), either in his published works or in his
notebooks. Moreover, for Galileo these pictures of the moon and sun served
only to make points that were developed in the text; in other words, they did
not stand by themselves in any meaningful way. Not that astronomers did not
resort to visual tools or visual reasoning, of course: on the contrary, astronomi-
cal books continued to carry plenty of images, as they had always done. Those
images, though, were not naturalistic depictions, but kept with the age-old tra-
dition of astronomical diagrams, i.e., schematic representations of geometric
configurations, spatial relations or motions, and not the visual appearance of
celestial objects.
We are to believe that Hevelius profoundly changed the way in which astro-
nomical practice and communication came to rely on images, inaugurating a
Maps of the Moon 37

new visual language. Selenographia is a treatise on the moon and its motions
as much as a treatise on how to observe and represent its face. It may be read—
or gazed at—as a visual narrative that strives to create several kinds of reality
effects. Like any other astronomical book of the time, it has scores of diagrams
sketching the relative positions of objects and the observer, angles of illumina-
tion, the behavior of light rays, and spatial relations in general. But there is
something else as well: as Winkler and van Helden argue, Hevelius carefully
sets a credible scene, which has himself working at the observatory. His obser-
vational procedures and equipment are thoroughly described in words as well
as depicted through images. Besides writing at length about the details of his
practice, discussing the best ways to manufacture a telescope, debating other
astronomers’ choices, he uses a novel (in astronomical books, at least) kind
of picture as a powerful conveyor of meaning. These pictures painstakingly
represent details of lens-grinding machinery, telescope parts, dark rooms, and
so forth, and they stand on an equal footing with the text. A kind of climax is
reached in a picture representing Hevelius himself in the very act of observing
the skies through a telescope.
All this textual and visual technology has the effect of recruiting the reader
as a witness, a “virtual witness,” to Hevelius’s work, which thus merits trust
because it hides nothing. It is as if Hevelius were saying, “Look at me look-
ing at the skies,” immediately to add, “And look at what I have seen.” Having
taken the reader with him into the observatory, having described and depicted
what happens there, Hevelius can now show what he discovered through the
telescope. Trust in Hevelius’s representations increases as the reader is re-
minded that Hevelius was not just the telescopic observer, but also draftsman
and engraver, as I have already mentioned. With so many semiotic indices
pointing to Hevelius’s trustworthiness, as well as the text’s scathing criticism
of previous attempts to represent the moon, the reader is apparently ready to
look at any of the multiple lunar images in Selenographia, let her eyes wander
across the surface, so impossibly near, clear, and palpable, and believe Hevelius
has rendered the moon “as it is.”
As it is? Christian Jacob eloquently argues that this is not the case: “The sel-
enographer draws not the image as seen through the telescope, but a mental
image, a series of details that he must put as fast as possible in their places on
the complete image,” he writes. The gap between eye and hand is impossible
to fill completely: “A drawing, painting, or engraving do not restitute whatever
was not already inscribed in one’s memory (…) Between observation and map
lies a space of loss, displacement, and oblivion” (Jacob 2011, 623). Memory and
indecision about what has just been seen thus appear as the key elements gov-
erning the very bodily work of the selenographer, in a manner rather unknown
38 Haddad

to the terrestrial cartographer working from previous models, templates, de-

scriptions, coordinates. And Hevelius is the first to admit how much he has to
rely on memory, writing that

[a]t the very point of time when we sketch the figure and start a picture,
we find out quickly that most, if not all, escapes our memory. It is there-
fore necessary that every little point is observed ten times or more before
the proper place of some spot, its figure and its form, can truly correctly
and accurately be reproduced on the paper.
HEVELIUS 1647, 209

In order to produce a single portrait of the moon on a given phase, Hevelius

has to move his whole body, stand up and sit down, repeat the same gestures
dozens of times. But then the weather changes, clouds obscure his view, the
moon moves out of sight, and a night’s worth of observations and drawings
is rendered useless. Indeed, the observational work that resulted in the ap-
parently smooth sequence of 40 images of the progression of the phase cycle
extended over more than two years. We can safely guess that each engraving
must have started from a sketch that was corrected and retouched hundreds,
maybe thousands of times.
If Hevelius’s moon images really perform the naturalistic illusion of imme-
diacy, this is acknowledged as the fruit of intensive labor. Of course, there is
nothing new in this, since no one ever claimed that being “true-to-nature” was
an effortless achievement. On the contrary, the whole idea of art in Hevelius’s
time revolves precisely around the specific effort that must be made in order to
fill that “space of loss” that extends between the representation and the repre-
sented thing. Ultimately, belief in the representation has always been a matter
of convention and voluntary submission on part of the viewer. What I want to
contend, however, is that upon looking closely at Hevelius’s lunar images we
may become less certain about Winkler and van Helden’s otherwise cogent
argument about Hevelius’s naturalism. This point has already been eloquently
made by Kathrin Müller, who writes that “[t]his argument, however, oversim-
plifies matters and does not pay due attention to the variety of both the images
in the book and the ways in which Hevelius employs them” (Müller 2010, 356).
Echoing concerns previously voiced by Claus Zittel (2002, 14), Müller cautions
against a blanket embrace of Winkler and Van Helden’s argument, explicitly
rejecting a view such as Adrian Johns’s, who had written that “in Hevelius’s
books, the page was to be accounted a direct representation of the heavens”
(Johns 1998, 437). Instead, Müller argues that “in many cases, Hevelius either
verbally or by means of formal features openly draws the reader’s attention to
Maps of the Moon 39

FIGURE 8 Two successive views of the crescent moon included by Hevelius in his
Selenographia (the left one between pages 416 and 417; the right one between
pages 430 and 431). The inscriptions give information on the precise hour and dates
of the observations (which were in fact not successive) and the celestial coordinates
of the moon. However, they should not be taken to represent truly “instantaneous”
views, for Hevelius had to go back to the telescope many times before he was able to
finish each one of the 40 images like these in the book. Near the right-hand limb it
is clearly possible to notice a slight change in the positioning of the surface f­ eatures,
resulting from the moon’s libratory motion during the ­intervening months.
COURTESY ETH-BIBLIOTHEK ZÜRICH (Rar 8932 q, DOI 10.3931/e-rara-238)

the fact that [the reader] is looking at images (re-)designed for a printed book”
(Müller 2010, 357).
Take the portraits of the moon in different phases. Selenographia includes
no less than 40 illustrations of this kind, interspersed among almost 200 pages
of text. Each picture differs from the previous one through the addition of a
tiny new slip of illuminated surface or the subtraction of what has fallen into
obscurity, as the moon wanes and waxes every month. The accompanying text
offers a lengthy description of the new formations revealed, the changes in
aspect of those that were already visible due to varying angles of illumination,
and the conditions surrounding the observation. The whole sequence unfolds
in time as a story in words and images, with an unequivocal narrative quality.
But then, if we inspect any one of these phase portraits (Figure 8), there is
something uncanny about them. As happened in Galileo’s case, these portraits
are at once seemingly familiar, indeed they look like naturalistic representa-
tions of something, and yet strangely unfamiliar, when, after looking around,
40 Haddad

one fails to recognize anything that really looks like them. It is impossible to
achieve a sense of scale, for the images stand alone, without any standard of
comparison. Granted, each phase portrait is invaded by textual signs that point
to the external referent. All of them have a title such as, for instance, “This is
the moon as observed from Gdansk on this specific date, its celestial coordi-
nates being such and such.” But raise your eyes to the moon on the same phase,
and it simply does not look that way, even if magnified through a telescope.
Indeed, telescopes and observational practices vary widely in the seventeenth
century, and, just as with any other scientific instrument, one has to learn how
to “see” any desired effect (Van Helden 1994).
But even for observers sharing the same observational standards, the gap
between Hevelius’s pictures and any instantaneous image will remain irre-
deemably open. The images are in fact composites of observations performed
across different days, one phase almost invading the other, so to speak, in order
for Hevelius to resolve features that were possibly hard to observe, retouch,
or ascertain shapes and sizes of whatever he chose to draw. To this we should
add that the orientation of the lunar disk in relation to a viewer’s local horizon
is continuously changing, besides being dependent on the observer’s location
on earth. Indeed, if one looks at the moon when it is rising, say, and mentally
draws a “horizontal” line across the disk, a few hours later the same line will
be “inclined;” and if the moon is observed at the same time from two differ-
ent latitudes, one view will have to be rotated in order to perfectly coincide
with the other. This is why the waxing moon looks like a ‘D’ on the northern
hemisphere, and a ‘C’ on the southern. The result is that Hevelius’s portraits of
lunar phases can only “correspond” to the optical sensory experience of gazing
at the moon, even with the aid of a telescope, if they are manipulated, rotated,
and forced to fit the visual appearance. For naked-eye and telescopic observ-
ers alike, the endless details are nothing short of a new reality, a new visibility
that is being imposed on the moon. The images are “both something less and
something more than real space” (Jacob 2006, 14)—not unlike maps, even if
they arguably do not cross the cartographic threshold.
So we are dealing at once with the persistence of memory (the act of passing
from telescope to paper), the creation of a narrative (the sequence of repre-
sented phases), and a compositional act (adding up series of observations to
produce a single image). Besides that, we have to keep in mind that Hevelius
tries to portray something that is never “there,” as his referent is permanently
moving and changing. All of this indicates the centrality of time in Hevelius’s
endeavor: the time that is always threatening memory, the time along which
the visual narrative unfolds, the scattering over time of the many partial views
that add up to one composed picture, the impermanence of the moon itself.
Maps of the Moon 41

The central question in Hevelius’s work seems to be, more than naturalistic
representation, nothing less than putting time under control: he strives to find
ways to depict realities that are ever mutating, to impose a synchronic order to
asynchronous processes.
Nowhere more than in the full-moon maps that come with Seleno­graphia
is this quest more apparent, and in important ways they are maps precisely
because of the way Hevelius finds to represent time in them.

4.2 Hevelius’s Cartographic Invention

Already the first representation of the full moon in Selenographia (Figure 9)
strikes the viewer as some kind of cartographic image. Where does this iden-
tification come from? There are certainly some family resemblances that hint
to such identification. It is not a representation of “something” that takes place
somewhere else, but a “world” that is in itself a totality, a world that contains all
its own spatial relationships without the need of a physical outside. A circular
graduated scale along the outer edge of the moon marks the boundary of this
world and imposes on it a geometrical order, adding to the recognition of the
image as full-fledged map space, not an attempt at naturalistic depiction of an
object.
What is more striking is that we can see not only one edge or limb marking
the boundary between the blank page and the inner map space, but two. We
are before two slightly offset, but still clearly visible, circular disks represent-
ing one and the same face of the moon. Our eyes may get a little confused, for
around the center of the image we do not see a hint of its being composed by
two overlapping, offset disks. But as we get close to the edges, the double line
asks to be deciphered. The two graduated circular lines cross approximately
“east” and “west” of the image, but it is not easy to follow one rim without inad-
vertently crossing over to the other. And what are the crescent-shaped spaces
between both arcs, “north” and “south” of the image? The crescents seem to
be seamlessly connected to the central region, common to both disks, but it
is hard to be sure, since the very presence of the graduated circle makes it dif-
ficult to ascertain whether the delicate engraved lines are continuous or not.
Adding to the visual puzzle, this is unlike what one is used to find in double-
hemisphere terrestrial maps, where the disks do not overlap and simply repre-
sent two different “faces” of a spherical object.
What Hevelius is trying to convey with the two offset overlapping disks
is the fact that through time one sees not just half of the moon, but almost
60% of its surface. In other words, all that can be seen of the moon over time
does not “fit” in any straightforward manner on a circular disk. It is a situation
analogous to what would occur if one tried to (orthographically) represent a
42 Haddad

FIGURE 9 The first image of the full moon in Selenographia (between pages 220 and 221),
already showing the double rim, i.e., Hevelius’s solution to the problem of how to
represent the changing face of the moon resulting from libration. Topographical
features are subdued in order that variations in total brilliance (albedo) may be
highlighted.
COURTESY ETH-BIBLIOTHEK ZÜRICH (Rar 8932 q,
DOI 10.3931/e-rara-238)

globe from two different angles at once: there is more information than may
be squeezed onto a flat disk. At any given instant, half of the surface area of the
lunar body is observable—to be thorough, not exactly half of the moon’s sur-
face is visible to us at any single instant, because the moon is not at an infinite
Maps of the Moon 43

distance from the earth; but this is negligible. As weeks and months pass by,
though, some observable features gradually fall out of sight, as they seem to
approach the edge of the disk and then vanish, whereas others become visible
at the diametrically opposite region. The two superimposed disks are the way
Hevelius found to represent the extreme possible views: one shows the maxi-
mum “southeast” portion of the moon that can possibly be viewed, with the
“northwest” crescent region out of sight, and the other disk shows the opposite
extreme. Most of the time, an observer will not see either one of the disks,
but some intermediary situation. The lunar features located on the crescent-
shaped wedges vary in their visibility.
The phenomenon that Hevelius sought to represent by superimposing the
two disks is what is known as the optical libration of the moon.22 It results from
a combination of properties of the moon’s orbital motion around the earth. In
order to understand it in very simplified terms, we must first notice that the
moon’s own axis of rotation is not perpendicular to its orbital plane but in-
clined along a fixed direction in space. As a consequence, an observer on the
earth’s surface will at times be able to see the region around the moon’s north
pole, with the south pole falling out of view, and at other times she will see
the opposite. This results in an apparent “wobbling” oscillation of the “north-
south coordinates” of visible features. Another wobble, this time in longitude,
is related to the fact that the moon’s orbit is not circular, but elliptical, which
causes an observer to see more of the western or eastern regions of the lunar
surface at different times. (There is also a small amount of wobbling that re-
sults from the fact that no one observes the moon from the earth’s center, but
from its surface, causing a parallax shift.) The different kinds of libration add
up in a complicated way, with the consequence that any given instantaneous
visual appearance of the moon will not be repeated when it reaches the same
phase on the next month, as one might intuitively expect, but only after a few
years. In other words, the disk that is visible on, say, this month’s first day of
the full moon is slightly different from next month’s, which is different from
the next, and so forth. The difference lies on the surface features that can or
cannot be observed close to the limb, as well as the placement of the geometric
center of the lunar disk as it appears to one’s vision: the center is not fixed on
any given observable feature, such as a crater or valley.
There is much discussion as to whether Galileo had already identified the
existence and causes of the moon’s librations over time, but undoubtedly it
was Hevelius who brought the matter to the fore, making it a central concern of

22  See Włodarczyk (2011) for a detailed explanation of this phenomenon.

44 Haddad

Selenographia23 (Włodarczyk 2011). He took great pains to produce an empiri-

cally satisfactory account of the phenomenon, and then to express it visually:
the superimposed offset disks represent the visual solution he devised to the
problem of representing something that changes in appearance over time. It is
of paramount importance that we understand that the image does not corre-
spond to anything that one would be able to see at any moment, even with the
aid of a telescope. Rather, it condenses, or concretizes, in one representational
space, the maximal visual manifestations of a temporal phenomenon. By rep-
resenting something that cannot be seen by any observer, who is of necessity
bound to a determined moment in time (and to a place in space), Hevelius is
in fact doing away with temporal unity, one of the important concerns of picto-
rial mimesis, while staking all on the acceptance of a new convention. The very
first full moon image in Selenographia is more than a picture; it is a spatializa-
tion of a time-dependent set of underlying positional relationships between
features of the moon’s surface.
Arguably, the image is a map in a rather “strong” sense: it is by necessity not
intended as pictorial mimesis (although it certainly explores some of the con-
ventions of mimetic representation), and it subsists solely in a conventional
representational space that bears an arbitrary relation to the represented en-
tity and its internal spatiality. But the image still lacks the dense semiotic appa-
ratus that gave Van Langren’s map its cartographic identity. This is to be found
in the three foldout full moon maps.
The first one (Figure 10) is a faithful reproduction of the previous image, in
larger size. Like that one, it shows the two superimposed disks with the gradu-
ated rim. This time, however, the surrounding space is not blank, but is occu-
pied by ornaments placed at the four corners. On each corner a pair of putti
perform a specific function. On the upper left of Figure 10, the putti hold a
banner with the title of the map (“The natural face of the full moon”), a state-
ment of authorship and date (“drawn and engraved by Johannes Hevelius in
the year 1645”), and details of what is shown (“with the edges of the disks of
maximum and minimum libration in both directions”). Hevelius is careful to
claim the moon and its librations had “never before been so accurately ob-
served.” Then, at the upper right corner of Figure 10, the putti stretch a ban-
ner containing a passage from Seneca’s Natural Questions, according to which
nature only reveals its secrets to those who patiently and laboriously go after
them. At the lower left of the same image, one putto kneels on the floor holding

23  Van Langren explicitly mentions libration in the inscription on his map, and announces
he has a complete description of the phenomenon, which he claimed would be demon-
strated with the aid of a lunar globe he was supposedly making.
Maps of the Moon 45

FIGURE 10 The same image as before, but now enlarged (foldout between pages 222 and 223)
and framed by putti and scale keys.
COURTESY ETH-BIBLIOTHEK ZÜRICH (Rar 8932 q, DOI 10.3931/e-rara-238)

a large book open, while the other sits on a stool and draws on the book with a
compass; below them there is a scale showing real distances in German miles.
Finally, the putti at the lower right corner are shown making measurements:
one of them observes the moon with a telescope that he holds with one hand,
a graduated staff in the other, and the second one draws in a sketchbook. Both
capture aspects of Hevelius’s own work. Below them one can see another scale,
this time angular, in degrees of the ecliptic. It can almost go without saying
that the corner scenes, with banners, inscriptions, scales, and instruments of
the trade are indices of the sheet’s belonging to what any reader would identify
as the class of objects called maps.
Now, let us remember that another effect of libration is that the geometric
center of the visible face of the moon will keep changing its location in rela-
tion to surface features themselves. The path described by the visual center
is not a simple figure, such as the line-segment joining the two centers of the
46 Haddad

11b

FIGURE 11
Hevelius came up with a
provisional graphical device
to locate the center of the
effectively visible lunar
disk at any moment of the
libration cycle, seen here on
Figure 11a. The device was
placed on the central region
of the map, as shown on the
detail (Figure 11b).
COURTESY
ETH-BIBLIOTHEK
ZÜRICH (Rar 8932 q, DOI
10.3931/e-rara-238)
11a

disks representing the states of maximum libration. Hevelius was able to come
up with an ingenious, albeit provisional, graphical device that allowed observ-
ers to approximately pinpoint, on the image, the location of the center at in-
termediary states of libration—it was provisional because, to Hevelius’s own
admission, the device would stop furnishing the roughly correct position of
the center within observational limits after a few years. He succeeded in this
because he found a way to express the state of libration as a function both of
the moon’s position along its orbit and the earth’s position around the sun.
The graphical device was a diamond-shaped graticule that Hevelius described
in general terms, with great care (Figure 11a), and also placed on the central
region of the double-disk image (Figure 11b). In possession of the values of the
aforementioned moon-earth and earth-sun orbital parameters, the reader only
had to locate them along the oblique axes of the graticule and plot the point
that corresponded to the coordinate pair. This point was the approximate geo-
metric center of the visible disk for the specific moment in time that was en-
capsulated in the orbital configuration itself. From this center the observable
Maps of the Moon 47

position of the limb at that precise same moment could be traced with a com-
pass (Włodarczyk 2011).
Notice then how Hevelius was offering his readers what looks like a map-
instrument, even more than a map-image. Of course it could not be used to go
anywhere, to place anything, but it could still solve, graphically, a specific kind
of problem. Hevelius created a cartographical object that could not only be
rotated to “match” visible reality (however carefully we have to interpret this
operation), but he was doing something much more profound: cartographic
space itself, not only the material object, was in a way open-ended. He gave two
possible appearances of the lunar surface, but readers might find using their
own means what the disk would “look like” on any other occasion. Hevelius
furnished a cartographic base-space whose limits change over time, and it was
up to readers to find the boundaries of this space at a given moment.
The two superimposed libration disks that make up the cartographic base-
space in this map and the previous one represent the full moon under direct
solar illumination, i.e., the “real” condition of visibility. The effect of direct il-
lumination, as we have seen before, is to make topography difficult to discern,
with edges losing sharpness and small-size features getting fainter or totally
disappearing. The next map addresses these problems directly, in a very radical
way (Figure 12). Again we are in front of the two libration disks and ornamented
corners. The banner carried by the upper-left corner putti in Figure 12 gives the
map’s title as Tabula Selenographica, adding that it is “a true orthographic de-
lineation, made with the aid of the telescope, of the seas, bays, islands, conti-
nents, promontories, lakes, wetlands, mountains, plains, and valleys that exist
on the visible surface of the moon.” Hevelius willingly surrenders to terrestrial
cartographic conventions. All of a sudden, the lunar surface is filled with earth-
like “geographical accidents,” marked on the image with proper names coming
straight out of ancient geography: Mare Mediterraneum, Insula Corsica, Pontus
Euxinus … The textual surroundings of this outline map reinforce the transfor-
mation of the moon in a kind of earth, as effected in and by the map. In the text
pages among which the map was to be inserted, Hevelius discusses at length
how he came to his nomenclature, noting that the definitive step was taken
when he had the revelation that the moon’s surface was the exact mirror of the
earth’s. The resort to ancient and biblical geography to baptize the features of
the moon’s surface, in which he believed he saw the Ptolemaic ­ecumene, was
an irenic gesture. He borrowed toponyms from Abraham Ortelius’s Thesaurus
and the Bible, consciously avoiding Van Langren’s overtly political decisions.
The result, writes Nydia Pineda, “was not just an accommodation of terrestrial
cartography onto a survey drawn from the telescope, but was in itself a repre-
sentation of cultural transfer: the geography of most interest to humanist and
48 Haddad

FIGURE 12 In the second foldout map included in Selenographia (between pages 226 and
227), Hevelius sacrificed albedo to topography and nomenclature.
COURTESY ETH-BIBLIOTHEK ZÜRICH (Rar 8932 q, DOI 10.3931/e-rara-238)

biblical scholarship was projected onto the moon. The reader would revisit
mythology, history, and texts conveyed through the nomenclature” (Pineda de
Ávila 2017, 176–177).
Van Langren had organized his map space according to a metageography
based on stark, simple oppositions: lands and seas, large and small, central
and peripheral. The symbolic order imposed by Van Langren’s choice of no-
menclature was accordingly organized in the same dualistic way: large and/
or central areas are named after powerful patrons, which in turn determine
the names that should or should not be given to nearby features. Hevelius of-
fers instead a more nuanced hierarchy of forms, sizes, and relationships. The
banner on the upper-right brings a legend with the key to the legibility of the
map: M is for mountains, I for islands, Pr for promontories and so on. Not only
is the map now covered with toponyms, the visual representation itself has
undergone a profound transformation: what on the previous map was simply
shaded now gains a rich texture, and small hills or mounds abound along the
Maps of the Moon 49

FIGURE 13 Detail of the map in Figure 12, showing Hevelius’s use of rows of
“mounds” and broken, wavy lines to create topographical texture.
COURTESY ETH-BIBLIOTHEK ZÜRICH
(Rar 8932 q, DOI 10.3931/e-rara-238)

boundaries between dark and light regions. What is more, Hevelius inverts the
overall shading scheme, in such a way that “bodies of water” are no longer dark,
but vast blank spaces populated by occasional “islands,” as viewers were used
to find in terrestrial maps (Figure 13). The putti at the lower corners seem not
to be contemplating from a distance any longer, but actively engaging in survey
work. One of them holds a telescope that is not pointing upwards, to the sky,
but straight ahead, to the “field.” The distance scale becomes a ruler that can
be grabbed and applied to the terrain. The moon is barely a celestial object
anymore, but a world as near and palpable as the earth; the moon map looks
almost undistinguishable from a terrestrial one.24

4.3 Eclipse Maps and Do-It-Yourself Cartography

Time is central to another kind of map present in Selenographia, those repre-
senting lunar eclipses. Eclipse maps would have a vast progeny over the next
centuries, and they remain popular among sky watchers. A lunar eclipse map

24  The third foldout full moon map is similar to the one shown in our Figure 10, but high-
lighting the surface relief, with an oblique source of illumination (of necessity artificial,
for the real full moon occurs under conditions of direct incidence of sunlight).
50 Haddad

basically represents a number of different positions occupied by the earth’s

shadow on the moon’s surface during the course of an eclipse. The position
of the arc that marks the edge of the shadow is shown at set intervals, as in
Figure 14.
The most obvious use of such maps has to do with the determination of the
longitudinal difference between two observers that are able to exchange their
records of a lunar eclipse. The idea behind the method is deceptively simple:
both observers just have to measure the local time (i.e., the “true” astronomi-
cal time at each observer’s location) when the earth’s shadow reaches a given
feature on the moon’s surface. If they really observed the same moment of
the eclipse, as determined by the progression of the shadow, the difference
in their records of local time translates into the relative longitude between
their earthly stations. Since lunar eclipses are fairly frequent, and, unlike solar
ones, are visible by all observers for whom the moon is above the horizon, the
method should provide an easy means of determining relative longitudes: all
that was needed was to plot the evolution of the shadow, taking care to mark
the local time when it attained such or such a position on the lunar disk, and
compare it to similar plots received from elsewhere.
Hevelius provides his readers with the necessary “instrument” for recording
and exchanging the time development of a lunar eclipse, in the form of highly
simplified cartographic bases or templates that the reader might copy in order
to plot her own eclipse observations and exchange them with other practitio-
ners (Figure 15). Such exchanges indeed occurred, as is witnessed, for instance,
by the fact that Hevelius’s eclipse template was included in some issues of the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and the society’s archive keeps
a few precious examples that were sent back, overlaid with shadow-boundary
arcs delicately drawn by their senders (Pineda de Ávila 2017, 232–243).
Although it was in principle capable of delivering the much sought after
longitudinal differences, the eclipse method was plagued by impracticalities
that rendered it quite unreliable. In the mid-seventeenth century, the most im-
portant obstacle to a successful employment of the method was located in the
observation process itself: a number of optical processes conspire to make the
shadow boundary on the moon’s surface considerably diffuse, even if viewed
through the telescopes then available. As a consequence, it was all but impos-
sible to reach any degree of consensus on what it meant for the shadow to
reach a given surface formation (or, which amounts to the same thing, to find
agreement on where exactly one should “see” the boundary between light and
darkness). Besides that, the measurement of local time was very difficult to
achieve to a level of accuracy that would not translate into egregiously large
errors on the relative longitude estimate.
Maps of the Moon 51

FIGURE 14 A complex image representing the time-evolution of a lunar eclipse (inserted

between pages 466 and 467 of Selenographia). The larger image shows a
highly schematic outline of the moon’s surface, without topographic or
albedo markings, in order to value the geometry of the earth’s shadow
boundary successive positions.
COURTESY ETH-BIBLIOTHEK ZÜRICH
(Rar 8932 q, DOI 10.3931/e-rara-238)
52 Haddad

FIGURE 15 Hevelius’s template or “base” map (“Figura Pleniluniorium Generalis,” between

pages 548 and 549), which was to be used by eclipse observers irrespective of the
libration state. Highly simplified, the image does not even show the moon’s edge,
which readers should plot themselves on the occasion of a specific eclipse, along
with the arcs marking successive positions of the earth’s shadow.
COURTESY ETH-BIBLIOTHEK ZÜRICH (Rar 8932 q, DOI 10.3931/e-rara-238)

By the late seventeenth century, though, there was hope that improvements in
instrumentation could mitigate those problems. Thus, eclipse maps registering
the local time for a number of successive positions of the shadow boundary
might, after all, meet with their intended use. But there was another important
question that had to be faced before that: there was no point in comparing two
eclipse maps if they did not record the same events. In other words, the observ-
ers would have to agree beforehand on exactly what surface features would
Maps of the Moon 53

have the instant of their shadowing recorded. This could be solved if a central
authority determined which surface features should command observers’ at-
tention, and then collected and compared the records made by astronomers
positioned on different locations.
Giovanni Domenico Cassini was the individual with the necessary resources,
including personal and institutional power, to promote this kind of central-
ization, that is, to establish a standardization of observational protocols, or at
least to gather a large enough number of not necessarily uniform records (and
then see if it was still possible to compare them in some way). The dominant
figure of French astronomy since the 1670s, when he founded the Paris Royal
Observatory on Colbert’s invitation, an intimate of Louis XIV, and an influen-
tial member of the Académie des Sciences, Cassini spent decades overseeing
large astronomical and cartographic projects that could only come into being
through the mobilization of large networks of practitioners.
In the Mémoires of the Academy meeting of August 30, 1692, we find Cassini
reporting at length on the lunar eclipse that had taken place on July 28. After
learning that bad weather in Paris prevented the Royal Observatory from re-
cording the eclipse from start to end as minutely as Cassini had hoped for, we
read that “in several other towns where M. Cassini maintains correspondence
with talented astronomers, who were thoroughly prepared to observe the
eclipse, the weather has not been more favorable.” Some of these astronomers
were under Cassini’s direct orders, as we are told: “M. Beauchamps, gentleman
of Avignon, has been expressly dispatched to Carpentras to observe the eclipse
therefrom (…); in Aix, M. Brochier was prepared to make the observation; and
M. Cassini’s eldest son was placed in S. Malo” (Cassini 1730, 151–152). Four other
astronomers are also mentioned, but it is not clear except in one case whether
they had been “expressly dispatched” by Cassini or had voluntarily sent in their
results to the Royal Observatory.
Even if all observations were hampered by bad weather, preventing the ob-
servation of the same events along the shadow’s progression, Cassini was able
to devise a method that could still extract something from the data. He showed
that with records from at least three different observers, it was possible in princi-
ple to work out mathematically the longitudinal differences even if they had not
registered exactly the same events. The demonstration was textual and graphi-
cal, and for the latter Cassini employed a typically Hevelian template map.
Cassini was also involved in the establishment of a heavily reproduced,
used, and circulated map that first appeared in the same context of eclipse
observations. Much less schematic than the Hevelian templates, it was prob-
ably based on an earlier, somewhat ill-fated attempt to produce a highly de-
tailed, very large engraving that Cassini had undertaken in the 1670s, which we
54 Haddad

have already encountered in Figure 5b.25 A version of this map first appeared
in the almanac of the Paris Observatory, La Connoissance des Temps, in 1702,
and over the next few decades returned in slightly different versions. In 1730
it came out in its most iconic, frequently reproduced form (Figure 16), when
the Académie the Sciences decided to print the mémoires of its seventeenth-
century meetings. There is a dense textual layer, with letters referring to no-
table features that Cassini had selected as especially important for eclipse
observers. The title is interesting in itself, for it suggests that the image repre-
sents the “mean libration.” In reality, it is not in any sense an “average” over all
possible views of the moon’s face as it changes due to libration, as one may in-
advertently suppose, but an estimated, and once again, “eyeballed” depiction.

4.4 They Have Been Hevelian Too

Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598–1671) is one of the most famous Jesuit astrono-
mers of the mid-seventeenth century. In his own time, however, fellow Jesuits
had doubts regarding his technical skills (Pineda de Ávila 2017, 48–49). His im-
mense Almagestum Novum of 1651 was an attempt to revisit the whole history
of astronomy and settle, once and for all, the problem of the true “system of
the world,” which he took to be Tycho Brahe’s geo-heliocentric model, and in
no way Copernicus’s heliocentric one (Graney 2015). Above all, the book was
also Riccioli’s claim to credibility among his peers, an overwhelming act of self-
fashioning. Since he set about touching upon every astronomical subject that
had ever been developed by others, it is no wonder that he devoted a few of
the book’s more than 1,500 densely packed, two-column pages to selenography.
Besides, maps of the moon were already regarded as objects of prestige, ca-
pable of causing a lasting, positive impression on readers and patrons alike
(Pineda de Ávila 2017, chapter I), so it is no wonder that Almagestum Novum
contained two such charts, drawn for Riccioli by fellow Jesuit Francesco Maria
Grimaldi. What strikes me the most about the first one (Figure 17) is how thor-
oughly Hevelian it is: it employed exactly the same solution to the problem of
how to represent the moon’s changing appearance through overlapping, offset
circles corresponding to libration maxima. The second (Figure 18) could be
more properly called a “view,” if we are to follow Christian Jacob’s aforemen-
tioned suggestion; it could obviously be paired up with the series of moon im-
ages with a naturalistic aspiration that I have previously proposed.
Virtually all the specialized literature on Riccioli and Grimaldi’s maps of
the moon is devoted, however, to highlighting how different they are from

25  For a careful analysis of this project and the resulting image, see Pineda de Ávila (2017,
108–110 and 121–123, and references therein).
Maps of the Moon 55

FIGURE 16 Cassini’s large moon engraving prepared by Jean Patigny (Figure 5b) reached
a very restricted audience. Another, very simplified version of the image,
had e­ normous success during the eighteenth century, and was reproduced
­innumerable times in almanacs, textbooks, encyclopedias, and periodi-
cals. Shown here is a version included by Pierre-Charles Le Monnier in his
Institutions Astronomiques of 1746, itself a version of a famous astronomical
textbook by John Keill, published in Latin in 1718 (with many ­subsequent edi-
tions). Le Monnier’s map is, in turn, a faithful reproduction of the one that had
already appeared in 1730 in the first printing of Cassini’s 1692 ­communications
on lunar eclipses to the Académie des Sciences.
COURTESY ETH-BIBLIOTHEK ZÜRICH (Rar 4053, DOI 10.3931/e-rara-2554)
56 Haddad

FIGURE 17 Riccioli and Grimaldi’s moon map (included between pages 204 and 204 ½
of the first volume of the Almagestum Novum) adheres to Hevelius’s solution
to the problem of how to represent libration, with the pair of offset circles,
although Riccioli proposes another graphical device to locate the visual cen-
ter of the lunar disk (the small circle at the center). The map does away with
Hevelius’s naming scheme, however, putting in place a system based on rules
about what names could appear in each one of the octants clearly discern-
ible in the image. A balance between topography and brilliance is attempted
by a clever use of the varying spacing and angles of the line incisions.
COURTESY ETH-BIBLIOTHEK ZÜRICH
(Rar 9471, DOI 10.3931/e-rara-520)

Hevelius’s (see, e.g., Whitaker 1999, 60–68; Montgomery 1999, chapter 12;
Vertesi 2007; Pineda de Ávila 2017, 177–183). In very important and consequen-
tial ways they really are. Great importance is accorded to the fact that Riccioli
devised yet another nomenclature scheme, which he explains in full detail
in the text. His system of choosing names for the features on the lunar sur-
face was poised to supersede Hevelius’s, and, to some measure, is still in use.
Maps of the Moon 57

FIGURE 18 Immediately following the previous map, this second image clearly puts greater
weight on volumes and suggestions of tri-dimensionality. It is not topographic,
though, but much more in line with the naturalistic tradition. Also absent is the
double outer edge.
COURTESY ETH-BIBLIOTHEK ZÜRICH (Rar 9471, DOI 10.3931/e-rara-520)

Riccioli’s name choices and their distribution over the moon are overtly politi-
cal, unlike Hevelius’s irenic proposal. But their politics is also not the same as
Van Langren’s: it is the politics of the Republic of Letters itself that is allowed to
be represented on the map. Innumerable astronomers and philosophers from
Antiquity onwards receive their share of lunar territory, accorded to each one
on the basis of merit, but also of religious allegiances. Unsurprisingly, Roman
Catholics get the “best” spots, i.e., larger, more central ones or those nearer to
pleasant regions such as the Sea of Tranquility, not the Ocean of Storms.26

26  It is interesting to note that the Latin inscription below the map’s title translates as
“Neither do men inhabit the moon, neither do souls migrate there.” Riccioli is thus clearly
rejecting any credence of earth-moon parallelisms based on assumptions of a real mirror-
ing, and openly embracing the artificial, arbitrary character of the politics he projects on
the lunar surface.
58 Haddad

Yet, despite this undeniable and extremely important difference, among

many others that have been explored in great detail by scholars, I sustain
that Riccioli and Grimaldi did not escape the Hevelian outlook. They could
not come up with an alternative solution for the challenge of representing an
object that is permanently changing its countenance over time. Riccioli even
tried to present an alternative theory for libration, which finds its instrumental
expression in a graphic device that can be seen near the center of the map in
Figure 17. Like Hevelius’s diamond-shaped graticule to be used by the reader to
trace the effective limit of visibility of the lunar disk at any given moment, this
map uses a small circle that is to be taken as the visual translation of Riccioli’s
own model for libration. When it came to mapping the voluble face of the
moon, Riccioli and Grimaldi were able to deal with time only through its con-
cretization, freezing it on the page, as it were. Always taken to be Hevelius’s
polar alternative, their map was, in the end, a reiteration of the same carto-
graphic gesture.

5 Time Abstracted

This Section will take us to the Enlightenment and the emergence of a new
cartographic epistemology, which was in fact a model of a rising knowledge
practice based on gathering data through quantitative measurements, and
guessing new, unmeasured data through mathematical procedures. What
comes to mind is the cartographer-surveyor, who proceeds from a set of pri-
mary coordinates to triangulated ones. This is the epistemic environment of
Tobias Mayer, when he found a job at the successful Homann cartographic of-
fice in 1740s Nuremberg. The firm was expanding, and, as we will see in detail,
Mayer put the moon to use for terrestrial ends: longitude strikes again. But the
intelligibility of the moon was now of a different kind: it was only full—its
intelligibility—if the moon was to be subject to the same knowledge-making
procedures that lay behind a cartographic triangulation, and this is what
Mayer did. In the process, he invented a new way of dealing with the problem
of libration, by abstracting the effects of time, to the extent that all he cared
about was to represent absolute values of coordinates, without references to
human observers. The Section ends with another visual exercise, an assem-
blage of “surveyors’ moons.”

5.1 Known Unknowns

The telescope was a condition of possibility for the emergence of lunar car-
tography in the seventeenth century, and there is not a trace of “technological
Maps of the Moon 59

determinism” in this statement. It was obviously not the only such condition,
far from it: moon maps owe their existence to myriad factors, including among
others the general dynamics of patronage systems, competing traditions of
thinking about the moon and its relation to the earth, the transformations
in the status of images in astronomical investigations, the creation of publics
for such images (comprising scholars, patrons, collectors and so on), and, cru-
cially, the increasing availability and cultural significance of terrestrial maps
and the practices attending their production, circulation, and consumption.
And yet the telescope stands out as the material pre-condition for the appear-
ance of selenography, besides being itself part and parcel of the social, cultural,
and epistemological determinants I have just alluded to.
In the mid-eighteenth century, selenography become something differ-
ent from what it had been to that moment, and once again a material condi-
tion had to be met. Again, this has nothing to do with techno-determinism.
Now, the material operator resided on telescope eyepieces armed with mi-
crometers, something that had become quite common since the end of the
seventeenth century. It was only in the 1740s, though, that cultural, epistemic,
and economic conditions enmeshed this previously existent piece of ap-
paratus in a new practice of seeing and representing the moon. This would
deeply condition the practice of lunar mapping until around the rise of as-
tronomical photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Arguably, even photography did not represent as significant a break as did this
eighteenth-century transformation, at least if we are interested in the episte-
mological aspects of lunar mapmaking. In contrast to the situation in the early
seventeenth century, when selenography started to take shape even as tele-
scopic astronomy was being invented,27 what happened in the mid-eighteenth
century was that a well-worn piece of equipment was put to a new use, in
order to produce a type of information about the moon that had not been
sought before.
Simply put, a micrometer eyepiece allows for quantitatively precise mea-
surements of apparent linear distances between pairs of celestial objects in
the field magnified by the telescope. These distances may, in turn, be converted
to angles with the use of mathematical procedures, for angles are the truly rel-
evant data for positional astronomy. Although Galileo had already contrived
ways of combining rulers with his telescopes in order to investigate the precise
positioning of the satellites of Jupiter, usable micrometer eyepieces started to

27  Albert Van Helden suggested, in a classic paper, that even if selenography was made possi-
ble with the appearance of the first telescopes, fierce competition to produce moon i­ mages
may have been a driving force in attempts to improve the instrument (Van Helden 1974).
60 Haddad

appear only after mid-century (Brooks 1991). Their adoption by astronomical

practitioners was not marked by any simple “technological enthusiasm.” There
is no better indication of this than the reactions these precision eyepieces elic-
ited from Hevelius and John Flamsteed, the highly influential first director of
the Greenwich Royal Observatory.
Hevelius basically grew disenchanted not only with the new piece of equip­
ment, but also with the whole of telescopic astronomy, to the point that later in
life he abandoned optical devices altogether in favor of earlier “mathematical
instruments.” These aided him in the naked-eye observations he performed
in order to produce a massive catalogue of thousands of stars’ celestial coor-
dinates and visual magnitudes. In the nineteenth century, William Whewell
romantically declared, “[w]e may judge how great was the improvement
which these contrivances introduced into the art of observing, by finding
that Hevelius refused to adopt them because they would make all the old
observations of no value. He had spent a laborious and active life in the ex-
ercise of the old methods, and could not bear to think that all the treasures
which he had accumulated had lost their worth by the discovery of a new
mine of richer ore” (Whewell 1837, 267). Flamsteed, for his part, fully incor-
porated “these contrivances” into his observational practices, mainly for the
star catalogue he had also been preparing since around 1675. But he was al-
ways careful to maintain a distance from any kind of blind faith in instru-
mental prowess, stressing instead the persona of the “skillful astronomer”
(Spiegel 2014).
Cautious reactions to, or, in Hevelius’s case, plainly avoiding, precision
astronomy may be explained by the fact that when micrometer eyepieces be-
came relatively easily available by the 1670s, telescopic astronomy already had
some deeply ingrained epistemic practices. It was not straightforward, then, to
simply accommodate the new technology. In fact, with the major exception of
star cataloguing, as an enterprise that could greatly benefit from the quantita-
tive possibilities opened up by the new device, observational astronomy was
to a large extent dominated by the pursuit of discoveries. From the time of the
Sidereus Nuncius onwards, the telescope was recognized as an unrivaled pro-
ducer of “novelties:” it revealed the rugged landscape of the moon, sunspots,
Saturn’s rings, and Jupiter’s satellites, among other celestial phenomena. There
was scarcely a mathematical tradition about such kinds of heavenly novelties,
and as a consequence little use in describing them in quantitative terms. We
could even say that these phenomena were much more amenable to discur-
sive traditions akin to natural history writing than the established conventions
of positional astronomy. For many decades, according to Scott Montgomery,
“the telescope remained (…) an instrument of discovery, not of measure-
ment. ‘Discovery,’ as idea, aesthetic opportunity, and practical ladder to fame,
Maps of the Moon 61

was one the unifying themes of seventeenth-century European astronomy”

(Montgomery 1999, 175).
For more than a century, the visual apprehension and representation of
the lunar surface fell squarely into this “exploratory” astronomical outlook.
Even though the longitude problem, with all its obvious demands for preci-
sion measurements, became intermingled with selenography at a very early
date, aiming a telescope at the moon was above all a means of discovering new
features, naming them, and producing artifacts of elevated symbolic currency,
highly tradable in the market of the Republic of Letters—especially maps, of
course. This is how Cassini, in the late seventeenth century, even if he used
micrometer eyepieces as a matter of fact, did not bother to measure the coor-
dinates of the lunar formations represented in his maps. This is all the more
remarkable in Cassini’s second map, which had the explicit purpose of setting
a uniform protocol for eclipse observations. Thus, like all moon maps that had
come before, his charts were produced through “eyeballing.” The micrometer
may have served as a drawing guide, in order to correctly proportion the rela-
tive distances between the more noticeable features, but not as a measuring
device per se.
But what was the use of micrometric measurements of apparent distances
between points on the lunar surface? The short answer is that such measure-
ments were instrumental in a method that permitted the establishment of the
“absolute” coordinates of a few points on the moon’s surface, i.e., coordinates
referred to a reference frame rigidly attached to the body of the moon itself, not
to the apparent circle that we view in the sky (which, as we have seen, changes
due to libration). From the “absolute” coordinates of these points, others could
be calculated. We are starting to enter familiar terrestrial cartography territory
here. As is well known, mapmaking came to be increasingly dependent on sur-
veying methods in the eighteenth-century. Cartographers embraced geodetic
triangulation techniques: planting marks on the terrain, establishing their co-
ordinates (by astronomical means or otherwise), triangulating other points
using trigonometrical relations, and finally projecting everything on paper,
topography often included.
But what if the “terrain” to be mapped is not on the earth, but is the lunar
face itself? What would result from surveying the moon in order to map it, in-
stead of “eyeballing” its surface? This is, in a nutshell, the major transformation
that selenography experienced around 1750. Mapping the moon came to be
regarded as a surveying procedure, following the steps I have just mentioned:
determination of the absolute coordinates of a set of conveniently chosen
“first-order points,” establishment of a triangulation network with “second-
order points” not directly measured, and projection of the results onto a
plane surface.
62 Haddad

Indeed, for all their continuing claims of being unmediated visual represen-
tations of space as would be directly “seen” from enough distance, eighteenth-
century maps were the brainchildren of a different epistemology, one that
regarded mapmaking as “the process of establishing the relations (…) between
known entities and then using those relations to interpolate new entities” (Edney
1999, 186). These “new entities” were the unknowns of any well-posed problem,
and they were not to be directly measured or experienced. They could be the
deduced (i.e., interpolated) geographical coordinates of places that would not
be directly established. The more “precise” the first order measurements were,
the more reliable the deduced entities. Mapping, thus understood, became
a proxy for Enlightenment epistemology at large, considered as a process of
“knowledge creation through the reconciliation of differences between obser-
vations and the laying out of the relations between individual pieces of data”
(Edney 1999, 186). Observation/precision, reconciliation/standardization, de-
duction/interpolation: those are the dimensions that determine the “knowl-
edge space” of the time. Behind all of this obviously lies an epistemology that
places extreme value on quantification and measurability.28
In mapmaking, this focus on quantitative data and their mathematical pro-
cessing entailed a new relation between map space itself and mapped space
in general. From Descartes to Newton to Kant, space became physical and
geometrical; it is tempting to say that the map projection then finally gained
a kind of metaphysical status, inasmuch as it revealed the deep structure of
physico-geometrical reality. Projected space increasingly became more real
than reality itself. It was only when this epistemological shift was well under-
way that the pre-existing instrumental condition afforded by the availability of
micrometer eyepieces could produce noticeable effects in lunar cartography.
The visible surface of the moon now emerged not as an “immediate” visual im-
pression that could be rendered in drawing, but as a kind of abstract, geometri-
cal, and coordinatized space that had to be made visible by an application of
the principle of interpolating unknown locations on a previously established
basic network of “knowns.”
Survey-based, coordinatized selenography first came to fruition in the work
of German cartographer and astronomer Tobias Mayer (1723–1762). It is a car-
tographic practice that developed against that background of a changing epis-
temology that I have sketched, but, more concretely, it came into being in a
context of cultural and economic anxieties brought about by growing compe-
tition between German private cartographic business enterprises and French

28  For more on the Enlightenment’s “quantifying spirit,” see the papers in Frängsmyr,
Heilbron and Rider (1990).
Maps of the Moon 63

state-sponsored mapmaking ventures. Additionally, an increasing perception

of British science as integral to Britain’s imperial claims and aspirations also
played an important role in the developments we will examine shortly. Finally,
the mid-eighteenth-century meaning of the Holy Roman Empire to its sub-
jects, alongside specific forms of patriotic sentiment, are variables that cannot
be neglected when we try to make sense of the transformations that moon
mapping underwent by that time. It is to such context and to Tobias Mayer’s
selenographic work within it that we now turn our attention.

5.2 Tobias Mayer, Model Employee

Born near Stuttgart, Mayer was the son of a skilled manual laborer who died
when the boy was barely 14-years old.29 Mayer was then sent to live in an or-
phanage, where he started to be noticed for his skill in preparing architectural
drawings. These drawings caught the attention of a local military officer, who
commissioned more work of the kind from the teenage Mayer, as well as a map
of the city of Esslingen and its environs, where they were both living by the
late 1730s. Draftsman, aspiring cartographer, and self-taught in mathematics,
in 1741 Mayer published his first book, a technical treatise on geometrical
problems.
After moving to Augsburg in 1744, Mayer found employment at the firm of
veteran cartographer, engraver, and fine books publisher Johann Andreas Pfeffel.
Manuscript evidence from the period shows that Mayer applied himself to the
study of celestial mechanics, mastering the newest methods for the calculation
and use of tables of solar and lunar coordinates (Wepster 2010). In all probabil-
ity, these astronomical interests were by and large motivated by the needs of
mapmaking, and astronomy was to become a lifelong interest for Mayer. It was
also in Augsburg that Mayer made the acquaintance of instrument-maker Georg
Friedrich Brander, who was to furnish him with precision telescope eyepieces in
the future. In 1745, Pfeffel published Mayer’s highly interesting Mathematischer
Atlas (mathematical atlas), a kind of encyclopedia that leaned heavily on visual
aids to explain a large number of branches of mathematics and its applications.
The bulk of this atlas consisted of 60 large-format copperplate engravings de-
signed by Mayer himself, plus an additional eight supplementary sheets. The
plates are grouped in 12 sections of varying extension. Of special interest are the
parts referring to astronomy (10 plates, including a fine Hevelian lunar map most
certainly based on Johann Leonhard Rost’s renderings, published in Rost’s 1716

29  Biographical information on Mayer and detailed expositions of the technical content
of his work are to be found in a number of works by Eric G. Forbes (1967; 1970a; 1970b;
1972; 1980).
64 Haddad

Astronomisches Handbuch), geography (4), chronology (2), and timekeeping (3).

In the preface, Mayer explains that the work was being issued in two forms: a
complete set, ready for binding, and also eight separate series with seven or
eight sheets each. Readers who were unable to afford the complete atlas could
separately purchase one or more of these series, according to Mayer’s preface.
But the sheets comprising each series were grouped so arbitrarily that buyers
would in no way be able to have all sheets pertaining to a given subject matter if
they acquired only one series: the ten astronomical plates, for instance, are scat-
tered throughout seven different series. Thus, what we must derive from this is
that Mayer was acutely aware that his work was above all a commercial venture
for Pfeffel.
By 1746 Mayer learned that one of the most successful mapmaking enter-
prises of the time in Europe, the Nuremberg firm of Johann Baptist Homann’s
successors, was hiring talented cartographers and draftsmen. The firm’s director,
Johann Michael Franz, had great ambitions. He wanted to secure state funding
for his business, and with this in mind he formed a Cosmographic Academy that
would hopefully operate under imperial patronage. In 1750, Franz published a
collection of writings by himself, Mayer, and Georg Moriz Lowitz, the other car-
tographer working for him at the time, with the intention of showcasing the kind
of work that could be expected from such an academy if only it were properly
funded. In the general preface (Vorrede) to the book, Franz warns:

But who will expect [the members of the Cosmographic Academy] to

work for the common good and at the same time bear their expenses?
If a Bradley is to bother with celestial observations, and thus enlarge the
realm of truth as he really did, a Count of Maklesfield must build him an
observatory. It would take only a few Lowndes to start the Cosmographic
Society. This was a gentleman in England, who died in 1748 and donat-
ed to Cambridge a perpetual endowment for an astronomical chair. In
France, the king is the highest benefactor of geography, but in particular
the Duke of Orleans, by means of whom D’Anville is able to apply himself
to geographical improvements without disturbances.
FRANZ 1750a, XXX 3 v.

Franz is thus appealing to longstanding sentiments of rivalry with the French

and the British in order to bolster his own business interests in the eyes of
German patrons. He makes it clear that British advances in astronomy
(increasingly perceived as key to Britain’s naval power) only came into being
because of the support it derived from aristocrats. Jean Baptiste Bourguignon
D’Anville, by then the rising star of French cartography, is made to depend
directly on the king’s house to work undisturbed. Franz then comments on
Maps of the Moon 65

the sorry state of German military engineering when compared to France’s,

where preparatory institutions for such careers are to be found, suggesting
that the Cosmographic Academy could also take care of that—if they were
adequately funded.
In another work included in the collection, titled Vorschläge, wie die
Erdbeschreibung in Absicht Deutschlands zu verbessern sey (“Proposals for the
improvement of the geographical description of Germany”), Franz is even
more explicit:

That is why I, alongside my fellows of the Cosmographic Academy, not-

withstanding other mapping commissions already formed out of faith-
ful devotion to our Franconian fatherland, wish to present [the imperial
authorities] a first display of our undertakings (…) in order to assure that
our first attempt (…) may serve as a perfect model for all geographical
work. Indeed, it is not without reason that the French have up to now pre-
ceded the Germans in such matters [of mapmaking] and the attending
measurements, whereof the Cassinian triangular measurement of France
and the published book La meridienne de Paris testify to the whole world
(…) that their king bears any costs in the way of that, no matter how large,
currently surpassing the Germans.
FRANZ 1750b, 387

So his claim is that an undeniably successful achievement such as the Cassinian

triangulation of France only came into being because of strong state support,
which, lacking in the imperial lands, has left the Germans behind. But, as he
promises here and elsewhere in the Vorschläge, he and his “fellows,” Mayer
among them, are the men to be entrusted with the task of elevating German
cartography to the same standards achieved by the French.
The Homann firm was in fact particularly well equipped to give some hope
of fulfillment for Franz’s grand plans. It kept a rich archive of manuscript and
printed records pertaining to the geography of the German lands and many
other parts of the world. Geographical coordinates, descriptions, drawings,
plates, unfinished maps, astronomical data—there was a bit of everything.
Mayer immediately engaged in mapmaking at the Homann firm, and, in the
course of some four years, he would prepare more than 30 terrestrial maps.30

30  In all likelihood, Mayer must have had the opportunity to skim through the prepara-
tory material for the then recently (1742) published Atlas Coelestis of Johann Gabriel
Doppelmayr. The atlas contained two insets with highly magnified details of the moon’s
surface (originally drawn by Robert Hooke and Francesco Bianchini), several outlines
of the full-moon disk, and a side-by-side comparison of Hevelius’s and Riccioli and
Grimaldi’s maps, nomenclature and all.
66 Haddad

From the start, Mayer placed the highest value on astronomical data that
could lead to precise determinations of latitudes and longitudes of key loca-
tions, laying out from these the basic grid from which a map would develop.
(Forbes 1970b, 144–145, quotes manuscript evidence of Mayer’s early reliance
on astronomical methods.) “Like all other geographers,” writes Matthew Edney,
“Mayer had to define the positions of the towns from reconnaissance accounts,
either by geodetic calculations or by plotting routes between known points in
the graticule” (Edney 1999, 186). By and large an armchair cartographer not
engaged in practical field work, Mayer had to rely precisely on these “known
points in the graticule,” i.e., latitude and longitude values for the basic trian-
gulation networks. These he found severely wanting, pointing out that even
for places on the German lands there were only 22 well-established latitudes,
and not a single reliable longitude (Forbes 1967, 235). In fact, the situation was
even more depressing: one of the latest and most successful Homannian pub-
lications, Doppelmayr’s celestial atlas, featured a table (“Astronomical basis of
recent geography”), widely regarded as authoritative, presenting what experts
generally agreed were uncontroverted latitude-longitude pairs for places in the
whole world—and it listed only 139 such locations.
Mayer the cartographer thus realized it was necessary to engage in a large-scale
enterprise of coordinate determination, an undertaking for which astronomy
was to provide the necessary methods. In a piece included in the Cosmographic
Academy book, Mayer voices the “hope of establishing, by the phenomena that
appear in the sky, the geographical lengths between places on our earth with
such accuracy as is appropriate to the present state of geography” (Mayer 1750a,
41). The “geographical lengths” he alludes to are, obviously, longitudes.

5.3 Map Space Is All That Matters

The moon was Mayer’s first choice among “phenomena that appear in the sky”
for improving the determination of longitudes. Initially he trusted that the
eclipse method would be enough, for things had changed in important ways
since Cassini’s time. Most importantly, by the 1740s some complicated equa-
tions from Newtonian mechanics had been worked out in such a way that it
was apparently becoming possible to predict the celestial coordinates of the
center of moon with great accuracy for any given moment in time—the center
of the body itself, not the center of the visible disk. It was a demanding and
laborious task, but could nevertheless be done. One could also find the relative
positions of the sun, earth, and moon for the whole duration of a lunar eclipse,
so that, with a few additional assumptions, it was possible to anticipate exactly
where the earth’s shadow would be located at any instant.
Maps of the Moon 67

This was a great prospect for longitude finders. Instead of relying on the
comparison of patchy data sets recording observations performed in different
places, records that could be totally incompatible and useless for determin-
ing the longitude differences, Mayer could hope for something much bigger: if
the unfolding of the eclipse could be accurately predicted, why not represent
the results on a map? In principle, this map could display the position of the
terminus of the earth’s shadow on the lunar disk at set intervals: every ten min-
utes, every 30 minutes, whatever was best. Each position would bring the exact
time it was predicted to occur, calculated for some location where the eclipse
was to be visible—say, Berlin. Mayer could make maps like this for any lunar
eclipse, and his employer would certainly be happy to commercialize these
objects. The buyer would have a very practical and easy way of determining her
own longitude in relation to the map’s chosen place of reference. (A means of
reliably establishing the buyer’s own local time was the only additional need.)
And the more maps were sold, the more longitudes would become known, not
to mention the increasing profits.
Mayer indeed prepared one such map, which was released by the Homann
firm in 1748, with the promise of an accompanying booklet (Figure 19). The
map displayed the time development of a lunar eclipse that was to take place
on August 8 of that year. The calculations had been made for Berlin local time.
It is a fascinating object: the moon’s face is clearly Hevelian, but the double
libration limits are omitted, since, in principle, the image represents the
moon as it was to be effectively seen on August 8. There are cartouches, scales,
inscriptions, and even a small map of the earth in stereographic projection,
showing the region where the eclipse should be visible. On the moon’s surface,
the successive shadow boundaries are finely displayed, and the (Berlin) timing
of each configuration can be easily read on a table that shares the space with
the other cartographic elements. All is written in German and French, adding
to the usability and commercial interest of the map.
But before his new eclipse map was released, though, Mayer realized it would
not work as intended (Mayer 1750b, 93). Libration was neglected in the calcula-
tions, so that what I have just written, that the double libration maxima were
omitted because the map should show the lunar disk as it would “effectively”
be seen on August 8, is only half-true. Like others before him, Mayer in real-
ity did not know what exactly the libration state of the moon would be on
August 8. He simply used a “mean” Hevelian moon, trusting that the effects of
libration would not change things noticeably. Besides, as a matter of fact, no
one really knew how to account for libration in the calculations: the equations
only gave the position of a single point, the center of the moon, and not of its
68 Haddad

FIGURE 19 Mayer created this multi-layered, highly complex image in 1747 or 1748, as a
display of what he still thought could be a protocol for the accurate ­establishment
of longitudes through the observation of lunar eclipses. It shows a Hevelian
moon, with the predicted projections of the edge of the earth’s shadow during
an upcoming eclipse, calculated for Berlin, as well as a stereographic terrestrial
map depicting the region of visibility. Additionally, the map contains detailed
­information, in German and French, about the expected timing of important
events that should be noticed during the eclipse’s duration.
COURTESY NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA

surface.31 Mayer’s realization, however, was that without accounting for libra-
tion, the map was bound to fail, as it did: on August 8, the ­calculated times for
the successive positions of the shadow proved wrong by several minutes.
Without a reliable theory to predict the libration state of the moon for any
instant in the future, Mayer set to empirically investigating the problem. In the

31  Hevelius’s theory did not work, nor did Riccioli’s and Cassini’s after his.
Maps of the Moon 69

course of months of patient telescopic observations, over the spring and sum-
mer of 1748, he realized it was possible to determine the “absolute selenograph-
ical coordinates” of points on the moon’s face under so-called “conditions of
mean libration.” To understand this, let us start remembering that the coordi-
nates of a lunar surface point, when referring to the visible disk of the moon,
are apparent. Since libration causes the visible disk to change, the apparent
coordinates change as well: a point that today appears to be exactly on the
center of the disk we see in the sky, tomorrow will be slightly off-center, and
continuously so, to be resumed again after a few years. The problem is that over
just a few days or weeks this variation can be so small that only a micrometer-
enhanced telescope can detect it, unless one observes over a long stretch, to
give time for the apparent positions to noticeably change. Thus, by employing
the micrometer, Mayer was able to quickly capture how the apparent position
of a few dozen points was changing as a consequence of libration. This pro-
vided him with the initial data for a theoretical determination of the rest of
their movement, in what amounted to a form of extrapolation. Now he could
finally determine the absolute coordinates of these points, defined as the av-
erage value of the apparent coordinates over the entire libration cycle. With
the absolute coordinates of those few dozen points, he could triangulate (i.e.,
interpolate) any other. Mayer’s moon becomes, thus, a perfect example of the
epistemological trends we discussed above: it was quantified, measured, trian-
gulated, and interpolated.
A consequence of Mayer’s new procedures for establishing lunar surface
coordinates was that, at least in principle, he should now be able to produce
eclipse maps that would not fail like his first one. But then he faced an obvious
problem: for each eclipse he would have to chart a slightly different moon, cor-
responding to the libration state in which it was predicted to be on the eclipse
date, a state that he now knew how to determine.32 He would have to render
this state on paper (not by eye, but by working out the orthographic projection
of the first-order points—now he knew how to do this, and there was no way
back). Over this projection he would then have to project the successive posi-
tions occupied by the terminus of the earth’s shadow, marking a local timing
for each one. This was simply not worth the immense labor it would demand,
and Mayer abandoned for good the idea of employing eclipse maps as a tool
for determining longitudes (Mayer 1750a, 41).

32  He would have to work back from the absolute coordinates of his first-order points to
the apparent values they were expected to have on the eclipse date, and then, as always,
interpolate the other points.
70 Haddad

Mayer did not abandon the moon, though. He decided to build a lunar
globe, because, first, he had the means to do so: the absolute coordinates of
a surface point, that he had just discovered how to determine, were nothing
less than true “globe coordinates;” second, he had a motive: by 1749, Franz was
enlisting subscribers to a new globe-making enterprise, and the moon speci-
men would be a nice item to sell (Gierl 2013, 275). In a prospectus for the globe
project published in 1750 to attract subscribers, Mayer wrote:

There is no doubt that selenography would become much more useful and
at the same time enjoyable if it were worked out better than it has hith-
erto been done. We have no more perfect drawings of the lunar spots
than the ones given by Hevelius and Riccioli after him. But one need only
compare them with the original, I mean with the moon itself, to see how
badly the similarity has been rendered. There is not a single spot to which
either its proper size or correct figure have been ascribed. Many, not only
the smaller, but also the larger spots, are altogether omitted, or wrongly
placed. (…) If I were to mention all the mistakes that have arisen from the
so-called libration, of which these renderings of the figure of the moon
have had a completely wrong concept, then I would need much more
time than my project allows. It will be enough to note that, since this
libration is now better understood, we know that the moon’s figure on
a surface cannot in any way be so drawn as to be of general use, and be
used in perpetuity.
MAYER 1750c, 5–6

For a number of reasons, Mayer’s moon globe never fully came into being, but
a few gores were actually engraved (Oestmann 2011). But as a by-product of
his labors on the globe, Mayer drew, in 1749, two maps that encapsulated his
new way of looking at the moon, and the new visibility imposed on it. The
maps, together with some 40 preparatory drawings, were also never published
in Mayer’s lifetime. It fell to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg to finally publish one
of the maps, the smallest, in 1775 (Figure 20), with a few additions and correc-
tions of his own.
By the time the map was finally published, what had gone into its creation
had already become standard knowledge for astronomers. Mayer had died a
respected professor, and had been awarded a prize from the British Board of
Longitude for his contributions to solving the problem (not through maps,
but through tables of lunar coordinates). Delayed and, in a way, neglected
by Mayer himself, the map may give a false impression of being of little rel-
evance. Visually, it has some kind of distinctively “modern” appeal: the relief is
Maps of the Moon 71

FIGURE 20 Mayer did not have a chance to publish the two hand-drawn maps he made using
the triangulation method of surveying that he had adapted to the moon, depicting
the “state of mean libration” (a photographic reproduction of one of the maps may
be found in Klinkerfues 1881, plate N). Lichtenberg had one of the maps engraved,
with some corrections, and included it in his own 1775 edition of Mayer’s Opera
Inedita. Here it is shown in yet another version, made by Johannes Hieronymus
Schroeter, based on Lichtenberg’s edition, and included in Schroeter’s 1791
Selenotopographische Fragmente (volume I, plate TV). Schroeter mainly added
place names and inverted the orientation of Mayer’s original image, so that the
moon is represented with the south up, as seen through a reflecting telescope.
COURTESY ETH-BIBLIOTHEK ZÜRICH (Rar 4281, DOI 10.3931/e-rara-1723)

carefully rendered, but not to the point of naturalistic illusion; then there is the
grid, the graduated parallels, and it appears we are done. But, after having seen
Hevelius’s “concretization” of time as a way to face the problem of representing
libration, and Mayer’s own dedication to the question, one may wonder: where
is libration here, after all? Has Mayer given up and depicted an “intermedi-
ary” moon surface? The answer, obviously, is no: what we see is the moon in
the state of mean libration. In other words, it is a rigorous assessment of the
average of all moon faces that we can ever see along a whole libration cycle,
orthographically projected onto paper. This is the moon as it would be seen by
an infinitely distant observer, whose line of sight crossed the lunar surface at
one specific point that does not coincide with the line of sight that any human
inhabitant of the earth would ever have, except possibly for a vanishingly small
moment. Moreover, it was constructed using the triangulation procedure.
72 Haddad

Mayer’s moon abstracts time entirely. It takes a “view from nowhere” as the
vanishing point for the representation. In a way, his map almost abstracts the
moon itself, as if all that counted were the internal relations of map space.

5.4 Surveying Takes Hold: Another Visual Exercise

We have now reached a position to experiment with another (cartographic)
visual series, like the one assembled in Figures 21a–d. What do the images
have in common, besides the external referent? The principle governing their
composition. All of them were produced starting from the measured absolute
coordinates of a mesh of first-order points, to which the other elements were
added by triangulation. And then the numbers, measured or calculated, went
through some process of mathematical projection in order to determine where
they should be marked on paper. The end products are simply a visualization
of what is taken to be an underlying, more real reality.
Readers cannot fail to notice that we have already met Figure 21a in another
series, in which it was Figure 5c. That series contained naturalistic depictions,
so one could wonder what the same image is doing here, together with the
surveyors’ abstract, mathematical moons. The point is that when John Russell
published his magnificent lunar planispheres in the early nineteenth century,
selenography had already mutated into the survey-based mapmaking practice
inaugurated by Mayer more than 50 years before. Russell’s depictions of the
moon, with their painterly-like quality, can look strictly like pictures devoid of
any “mapness,” and this is why the image was present in the naturalistic series.
But Russell’s planispheres were in reality the result of the new selenographical
practice: he employed precision eyepieces to carefully determine the coordi-
nates of 34 formations on the surface of the moon, and then interpolated the
other features. He chose to efface the visual inscriptions of this procedure from
the final products, in all probability to enhance their artistic value, but his is a
“surveyor’s moon” nonetheless, even if it does not confess to being so.

6 Time Eliminated

Even as surveying the moon quickly rose to become the dominant seleno-
graphical practice in the second half of the eighteenth century, and the elusive
“state of mean libration,” with time abstracted, became the standard mode of
representation, another change was already under way. We might say that, to a
great extent, this change emerged from the very same conditions and concerns
that made possible the kind of lunar mapmaking that has been associated with
Tobias Mayer in the previous Section of this essay.
Maps of the Moon 73

21a 21b

21c 21d
FIGURE 21 Another visual series, this time assembling together a group of four lunar maps
created following Mayer’s surveying approach. All of them show the moon in the
state of mean libration, in which, as argued on the text, time is “abstracted.”

21a John Russell’s 1805 image, already seen on Figure 5c, but now put in relation to
other similar images.
COURTESY WELLCOME COLLECTION (CC BY)

21b Johann Joseph von Littrow, Populäre Astronomie (Vienna, 1825), plate V of
volume II.
COURTESY ETH-BIBLIOTHEK ZÜRICH (Rar 4032, DOI 10.3931/e-rara-1534)

21c Moritz Ludwig Frankenheim, Populäre Astronomie (Braunschweig, 1829).

COURTESY SÄCHSISCHE LANDESBIBLIOTHEK—STAATS- UND
UNIVERSITÄTSBIBLIOTHEK DRESDEN

21d Adolf Stieler (editor), Handatlas über alle Theile der Erde und über das
Weltgebäude (Gotha, 1882), after an earlier, much larger, and highly successful
map by Wilhelm Wolff Beer and Johann Heinrich von Mädler.
COURTESY ETH-BIBLIOTHEK ZÜRICH
(Rar KA 99, DOI 10.3931/e-rara-71709)
74 Haddad

FIGURE 22
An “extreme close-up” image of the moon,
included in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia
(London, 1665), plate XXXVIII. Although
devoted to the microscope, the book
ended with an ironic turn to the
telescope.
COURTESY BRITISH LIBRARY

What happened is that, starting in the 1820s, lunar cartographers increasingly

abandoned the long-established custom of making unitary maps of the whole
surface of the moon. Instead, they turned to sectional charts depicting lim-
ited areas, the map space bound inside quadrilaterals—after all, they had the
means and motives for this move, i.e., they had access to ever more detailed
information about the lunar surface, but were unable to fit all of it in whole-
surface maps. Unconstrained by the limits of unitary map space, the new
charts also did away with the problem of how to represent the changing face
of the moon: they simply did not represent this face, but only parts thereof,
from the point of view of an observer no longer located on the earth looking at
the sky.
This new mode of representation that came into being in the nineteenth
century fit well with later developments in photography and other visual
technologies. Strangely enough, however, it also fit well with the moon of the
Space Age, as we will briefly see.

6.1 Feeling There

We have already met, in passing, the distinctly old question about the nature of
the lunar surface: is it smooth or rugged? If rugged, how high are its mountains
and how deep its valleys? Does it carry real oceans of water, sandy deserts, and
rocky plateaus? Convinced of the existence of a true relief, Galileo had already
tried to estimate the height of the mountains on the moon from the length
Maps of the Moon 75

of the shadows cast by them under different angles of solar illumination.33

However, as mentioned before, he was far from being the “first” to believe in
the moon’s surface ruggedness, although he was undoubtedly instrumental in
consolidating this view against any alternatives. So it is that in the seventeenth-
century selenographers and astronomical observers in general already had a
keen interest in the problem of lunar topography, addressing it in their depic-
tions and texts. Some, like Robert Hooke, were not interested in maps at all, but
only in details of the surface—in other words, the landscape, or moonscape, as
it would be experienced from a very close distance (Figure 22).
At any given moment, the level of access to surface details is fundamentally
constrained by the capabilities of available telescopes. By Mayer’s time it was
already possible to reach very high magnifications, which allowed him to pro-
duce not only the full map, but also dozens of “regional” views of the moon.
What is more, his lunar observation program was based on the practices of
terrestrial surveying in a more thorough manner than I may have hinted at be-
fore: he used triangulation procedures not only to locate points on the grid and
come up with the map, but also in order to investigate global deviations of the
moon’s body from sphericity, and to estimate local heights.34 As the eighteenth
century went on, telescopes substantially gained in magnification, and atten-
tion to landscape detail grew on the wake.
Johann Hieronymus Schroeter’s tellingly titled Selenotopographische Frag­
mente, from 1791, is a case in point. A magistrate in Lilienthal, Germany, and
“amateur” astronomer, Schroeter embraced the lunar surveying program to the
extreme.35 Totaling more than a thousand pages, his book contains just one
map of the full moon, basically a reworking of Mayer’s map (as we have al-
ready seen in Figure 20). His main interest, however, lies in topography and the
description of very limited areas of the moon’s surface. He devotes hundreds

33  More properly, I could have written that Galileo tried to derive this estimate from the
varying lengths of the dark features he interpreted as being necessarily cast shadows.
34  In other words, Mayer transposed on to his investigation of the moon the full range of
scales and approaches characteristic of eighteenth-century geodetic and topographic sur-
veying, the first of which had an immense bearing on the disputes around the shape of
the earth and the arc-length of a meridian that were taking place in Mayer’s time (for
an overview, cf. Widmalm 1990). I insist on this point because, as Matthew Edney has
warned, there is a “common misunderstanding that any surveying process involving the
construction of triangles, including graphic construction on a plane table or the trigono-
metrical solution of a simple system of intersecting lines, is ‘triangulation’” (Edney 2019,
90). What Mayer and the following lunar mapmakers have done is truly triangulation.
35  For an overview of Schroeter’s life and work, see Sheehan and Baum (1995, chapter 6).
An analysis of how Schroeter was perceived by his contemporaries and later historians is
provided by Oestmann (2002).
76 Haddad

FIGURE 23 One of the many “vertical aerial” views of the moon pre-
sented by Schroeter in his massive Selenotopographische
Fragmente of 1791 (here plate XVI of volume I).
COURTESY ETH-BIBLIOTHEK ZÜRICH
(Rar 4281, DOI 10.3931/e-rara-1723)
Maps of the Moon 77

of pages to exhausting “geographical narratives” of the moon, visually con-

densed in dozens of images of single craters or small groups, rilles, ranges, and
many other “systems” of various kinds (Figure 23). Almost all of them are, like
Hooke’s image, “aerial” views of very small regions. The effect is that viewers
are thrown into an undecidable state, as it were: not on earth, and not on the
moon as well, but almost there, in a kind of low altitude flight. A few times,
however, Schroeter risks a radically different point of view: a perspective that
would only be possible if he were standing on the moon’s surface, looking at a
distant mountain from the ground, not from the air.
Through the nineteenth century, attention to detail would become the de-
fining characteristic of lunar representation practices, visual and textual. The
developments took place along two closely related paths, discernible mainly
by virtue of how distant from the moon’s surface the makers of such represen-
tations were willing to place themselves and their readers/viewers. Schroeter’s
“low altitude flights” found an ardent follower in Franz von Paula Gruithuisen,
who, in the 1820s, published a number of his own reworkings of Mayer’s map
and, most importantly, several close views of limited areas of the moon.
Gruithuisen became particularly fixated on a small region where he was con-
vinced he had seen the infrastructure of a city.36 However, it was left to James
Nasmyth and James Carpenter to reach the apex of this tendency to represent
detailed surface features from very close up, and, ultimately, from the ground.
Nasmyth and Carpenter’s startling book, The Moon: Considered as a Planet,
a World, and a Satellite, appeared in 1874, when photography was already a
reality (even if its meaning and significance were openly disputed), and as-
trophotography in particular was also gaining widespread attention, in the
context of large observatories or in the hands of “amateur” enthusiasts.37 What
is remarkable about Nasmyth and Carpenter’s work, however, is that they did
not couple a photographic camera to a telescope and point it at the moon.

36  On Gruithuisen’s firm conviction about extraterrestrial life, and how it shaped his lunar
research program, see Sheehan and Dobbin (2001, 75–85) and Crowe (1988, 202–204). It is
impossible not to be reminded of later attempts at mapping the planet Mars and its sup-
posedly artificial canals and large-scale infrastructure. This story has been beautifully told
and analyzed by Maria Lane (2010).
37  All aspects of the place occupied by observatories and observational networks on the
epistemic and social infrastructures underpinning nineteenth-century astronomy are ex-
plored in an important collection edited by David Aubin, Charlotte Bigg, and Otto Sibum
(2010). For two fascinating examples of the different reactions elicited by photography
and other visual technologies from individuals that were neither “professional” nor “ama-
teur” astronomers, but were nevertheless deeply invested on astronomical observations
and images, see the works of Laurence Guignard (2014) and Artemis Willis (2017). A more
general investigation of early lunar photography is to be found in Bigg (2018).
 78 Haddad

24a 24b
FIGURE 24 Two photographs of plaster models included in James Nasmyth and James
Carpenter’s 1874 book, The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite
(London: John Murray). If Figure 24a can be clearly considered a vertical aerial
image, 24b places the viewer on the moon itself.
COURTESY THE PUBLIC DOMAIN REVIEW

Instead, they painstakingly created plaster models of small regions of the lunar
surface with all kinds of minutely imagined details, and took pictures of the
models. Artificial illumination was used to produce dramatic effects. Many of
the book’s images are aerial views, but so close that a reader can easily feel she
is about to land (Figure 24a). Others, however, are unmistakably what would
be taken by a photographer placed on the moon itself, even if on a high place
(Figure 24b). The viewer has been definitively transported to the moon, and is
surrounded by, or even part of, the moonscape.38
Schroeter, Gruithuisen, and Nasmyth and Carpenter represent a radical
close-up gaze directed at the moon. Most of their images are, in my view, not
prone to trigger that kind of “cartographic perception” that was mentioned
before. But there was also a second path along which the increasing access to
visual detail ultimately changed lunar representation practices and products
during the nineteenth century. Its origins can be traced down to the work of

38  For a penetrating study of Nasmyth’s work, see the recent essay by Omar Nasim (2018).
Maps of the Moon 79

FIGURE 25 Lohrmann’s proposed scheme for sectionally mapping the moon,

from his 1824 book, Topographie der sichtbaren Mondoberfläche
(Dresden: by the author), figure 3 of plate A.
COURTESY ETH-BIBLIOTHEK ZÜRICH (Rar 8933 q,
DOI 10.3931/e-rara-2278)

the Dresden surveyor-cartographer Wilhelm Gotthelf Lohrmann, who, in the

early 1820s, realized that the amount of detail accessible through the telescope
had become simply incompatible with whole-surface maps of the moon (lest
they become ever larger in physical dimensions, or were crammed with details
to the point of illegibility, or left out most of the discernible features). In his
1824 Topographie der Sichtbaren Mondoberfläche (“Topography of the visible
surface of the moon”), Lohrmann proposed another approach: sectional maps.
He sliced the usual circular representation space in 25 square sections, and
proposed mapping each of them individually (Figure 25). The completed maps
of four such sections were included in the book, but Lohrmann did not live
long enough to finish his project, although he left hand-drawn versions of all
remaining 21 sections.
80 Haddad

FIGURE 26 The first of Lohrmann’s sectional maps included in Topographie der sichtbaren
Mondoberfläche (Dresden, 1824), making use of the possibilities opened up by
lithography, and employing hachuring conventions for topographical features
that had recently been developed in the realm of terrestrial cartography. Albedo is
soberly represented through the use of stippling.
COURTESY ETH-BIBLIOTHEK ZÜRICH (Rar 8933 q, DOI 10.3931/e-rara-2278)

Lohrmann’s maps have a distinct topographical outlook, making full use of

by-then recent approaches to the employment of hachuring and stippling
in terrestrial charts, as well as of the possibilities opened up by lithographic
reproduction techniques (Weinek 1890, 202). As we can see in Figure 26, re-
lief is not represented mimetically, as a proxy for real optical experience, but
Maps of the Moon 81

through purely graphical conventions, which Lohrmann explains at length in

the book. The maps are detailed, but they maintain a sobering distance from
the lunar surface, and do not go down to the representation of individual fea-
tures. The projection is orthographic, as had almost universally been the case
with whole-surface maps of the moon. However, we can sense the appearance
of the conditions of possibility for an important later transformation: bounded
now by four straight edges, and not by a circle, the map space seems to “invite”
the kind of cylindrical projections that will become common later on.39
Even though Lohrmann could not complete his project, many other
nineteenth-century figures keenly embraced his idea that the best way of map-
ping the moon was through sections. His work was directly taken up by astron-
omer and geodesist Johann Friedrich Julius Schmidt, who not only published,
in 1878, the complete set of maps left by Lohrmann, but also his own Charte
des Gebirge des Mondes (“Charts of the mountains of the moon”), in 25 sections
as well. Prepared over the course of some 35 years of observations, Schmidt’s
maps displayed, when added together, more than 30,000 surface features of
the moon, in what amounted to an unprecedented level of topographic detail.
Like Lohrmann before, however, he did not “fly” low enough to present true
moonscapes. (In fact, Schmidt had already published, in 1866, three images of
very small areas, but they too were “aerial.”)
Sectional mapping became the standard approach to lunar cartography. Of
course, it lived alongside whole-surface maps, not to mention that sectional
charts themselves were usually intended to be assembled to form a large, uni-
fied depiction of the entire visible surface. A list of mapmakers who adopted
this approach, along with details of their productions, would be too lengthy
and add little to my argument. In any case, this list would certainly start with
Wilhelm Wolff Beer and Johann Heinrich von Mädler’s highly successful four-
section map, published between 1834 and 1836, and extend at least to Hugh
Percy Wilkins’s 25 charts from 1946 (which could be set in place following
Lohrmann’s standard 5 x 5 pattern resulting in an absurd, 8-meter wide moon).
Dozens of maps and individuals would lie in between. During this period, lunar
mapmakers sometimes collaborated with each other even across increasingly
meaningful national borders (in a field largely dominated by the Germans and

39  This “quadrilateralization” of map space will have important consequences for lunar
maps drawn from photographs of limited areas of the moon’s surface. In the early-
twentieth century, such maps started to simply plot the x-y Cartesian coordinates of any
point, measured directly on the photographs, and no longer the (selenographic) latitudes
and longitudes (Whitaker 1999, 154).
82 Haddad

the British, plus a smaller group of French astronomers), sometimes bitterly

quarrelled over nomenclature, observational priority, or the best way to repre-
sent some feature. Occasionally an undisputed leader appeared, such as Mary
Blagg, the foremost selenographer of the 1920s. A few of the sectional maps
that were published in the period maintained Lohrmann’s complex graphical
semantics for the representation of topography; most of them, however, radi-
cally reduced the meaningful graphical units—the “cartographemes,” if I am
allowed to name them—to just two or three simple line forms (see Figure 2).
Lunar mapping became a highly specialized niche in the ever more profes-
sionalized realm of astronomy. Decidedly empirical, and mixing painstaking
observational labor with artisanal virtuosity, it exerted an especially powerful
attraction upon increasingly sidelined amateurs.
All of the themes and persons I have just mentioned would merit in-depth
studies of their own. My aim, though, is to indicate how, once the integrity of
the lunar surface was broken at the level of representation, moon maps once
again became something completely different. A new gaze, a novel regime of
visibility, ensued. Depictions of the entire lunar disk have the power of remind-
ing viewers that they occupy a distant, earthly position in relation to the ob-
ject being represented. Limited-area, sectional maps, in turn, are able to bring
about an illusion of closeness, even if they do not get down to the landscape/
moonscape scale. A “regional” map of the moon, like Lohrmann’s and so many
others that followed, is akin to a regional map of the earth, in that it offers an
impossible aerial view that seems nevertheless attainable in principle—if only
the viewer could be “suspended” from the position he or she occupies in the
represented space itself. In this lies the specific kind of illusion of closeness
produced by such images. It is the opposite of the mimetic illusion pursued by
naturalistic representations, which strive to maintain the viewer and the rep-
resentation separated by the same spatial relation that would obtain between
the viewer and the represented object.
The end result is that sectional mapping of the moon may be interpreted as
yet another solution to the problem of representing an object that is perma-
nently changing its visible face. Although prepared along the lines established
by Mayer’s work, that is, through the projection of the absolute coordinates of
points on the lunar surface onto two-dimensional map space, sectional maps
no longer abstract time-variation by offering that elusive view of the state of
mean libration. What they do is simply to eliminate time altogether, by effec-
tively relocating the observer to a place beyond the earth. They are not to be
compared to the whole lunar disk, continuously wobbling in the sky, which
we experience from the earth. In reality, these sectional maps are like pieces
of fiction, inviting the viewer to believe that these are the aerial maps that a
Maps of the Moon 83

moon dweller would create of his or her own world. Their aspiration is thus to
represent the moon for itself, not for its earthly watchers, who cannot avoid the
changing appearance of the lunar face.

6.2 Being There

Fifty years ago, in July 1969, human beings set foot on the surface of the moon
for the first time. An icon of the Cold War, the Apollo Program triggered an
unprecedented level of exposure of the public to images of the moon. The
landing was broadcast in real time to the whole world, while newspapers and
magazines were flooded with photographs. But “moon-mania” had already
been mounting for at least a decade, starting when the Soviets had ushered in
the Space Age with the successful launch of the Sputnik, in 1957, and gaining
full momentum after 1961, when U.S. President John Kennedy unequivocally
framed the race to the moon in terms of national pride and security. This is
why we find a large commercial map publisher such as Rand MacNally & Co.
launching its first moon map in 1958, or public rants against the Soviets’ taking
advantage of the fact they were the first to obtain satellite images of the “dark,”
or far-side, of the moon to name features after living individuals, in violation
of the International Astronomical Union’s rules for lunar nomenclature. Also,
“moon-mania” is what lies behind popular didactic or commemorative wall
maps like those sponsored by the National Geographic Society or corporations
such as Esso or Rockwell Manufacturing, all in 1969.
But moon maps were not only part of the ideological setting of the Apollo
Program. They were also instrumental to the technical development of the
program. Suddenly, selenography was no longer the sole province of amateurs
or passionate moon watchers, but was part of the official agenda of NASA, the
U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Air Force Aeronautical Chart and Information
Center, or the U.S. Army Map Service. It had become a high priority concern
for the highest echelons of the defense apparatus, as a landing would simply
not be possible without detailed topographic and, now it was clear, geologi-
cal maps as well. Satellite imaging, not restricted to the visible spectrum, had
come into reality, and immediately became the basis for the large output of
maps by those agencies over the 1960s and 70s (see Whitaker 1999, chapter 10;
and Ré and Pérez González 2018).
Many maps that appeared in the context of the Apollo Program were almost
“plain” aerial images taken by satellites, overlaid by some kind of photogram-
metric layer. As I have mentioned before, the moon was among the first tar-
gets of the earliest photographic processes that appeared in the nineteenth
century. François Arago, one of the first individuals to ponder the epistemo-
logical underpinnings of Daguerre’s invention and its horizon of possibilities,
FIGURE 27 Photogeologic chart prepared in 1960 for the U.S. Geological Survey’s Lunar Prototype Charts series (this one being LPC 58),
and printed by the U.S. Air Force’s Chart and Information Center. SOURCE: LUNAR AND PLANETARY INSTITUTE
Maps of the Moon 85

already in 1839 expressed hopes for a “photographic map” that would put to
rest traditional telescopic lunar mapping, “one of the most time-consuming,
painstaking and delicate undertakings in astronomy” (quoted in Bigg 2018,
121). For many decades, however, photography was no serious rival to human
eyes and hands equipped with telescopes, micrometers, notebooks, math-
ematical tables, pencils, and graded paper. Even though the moon had been
photographed innumerable times, it was only in the 1890s that a fully pho-
tographic atlas came into being, under the direction of Maurice Loewy and
Henri Puiseux, at the Paris Observatory (cf. Sicard 2013). Yet selenographers
stubbornly held onto their usual tried and tested eye-and-hand techniques,
embracing photographic images as an intermediary step for the preparation of
their maps, and not as the end product. This is why we come across Hugh Percy
Wilkins still hand-drawing his monstrously large and detailed moon maps in
the 1950s.
Satellite images were irresistible, though. They were at the same time sign-
posts of the Space Age and functional to its technical needs. Images taken in
ranges beyond the visible spectrum were essential for the geological mapping
of the moon, which was, in turn, necessary for decisions regarding landing
sites. A map such as the one shown in Figure 27, prepared in 1960 by Eugene
Shoemaker for the U.S. government from photographic images, epitomizes
the extreme “cartographicalization” undergone by lunar maps in their for-
mal aspects. Nothing about this map is specific to the moon; a satellite could
well have taken the same kind of picture of a region of the earth’s surface,
and then these images would be processed, projected, overlaid, colored, let-
tered, and embedded in the two-dimensional space of the page in exactly the
same manner.
Space Age maps, however, treated the problem of the moon’s changing ap-
pearance just like the sectional maps that had risen to prominence in the nine-
teenth century: time-dependency was simply out of the picture. For all their
techno-scientific clout, vibrant colors, unusual projections, and increasingly
thematic content, they still were—and are—drawn from the point of view of
that suspended, non-earthbound observer flying above the moon. The only dif-
ference is that previous mapmakers could only feel they were in this place;
Space Age creatures could be there, with their satellite eyes.

Concluding Remarks: the Moon Is Dead, Long Live the Moon

From the point of view of its cultural valence, the Space Age is dead. Of course,
artificial satellites still surround us by the thousands, playing essential roles in
many aspects of modern life; the International Space Station is flying over us
86 Haddad

somewhere; science fiction movies and literature keep feeding our dreams of
escaping from earth-boundedness; plans for a crewed flight to Mars resurface
every now and then, while corporate moguls play with their own rockets; by
now old photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope still give some ex-
perience of the sublime, even if in the form of wallpapers on the screens of our
electronic gadgets; and, although strangely absent from public discourse, nu-
clear missiles, the most lasting legacy of that period, are still capable of wiping
out life as we know it. The fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11’s pioneering moon
landing may have briefly and nostalgically given a second chance to the Space
Age, in the form of innumerable exhibitions, television specials, and all other
kinds of recycling of material and visual artifacts of yore, including moon maps.
I seriously doubt this will last for long, though. In a recent collection of essays
suggestively subtitled Astroculture after Apollo, editor Alexander Geppert con-
vincingly makes the case that, following the lunar landings, “outer space itself
lost much of the political relevance, cultural significance and popular appeal
which it had been gaining worldwide since the mid-1920s, in particular after
the end of the Second World War” (Geppert 2018, 4).
The fact is that no one has been to the moon since 1972, and the waning of
the Space Age is directly related to this. As a consequence, lunar maps have
receded back into highly specialized niches, after briefly enjoying some degree
of popular appeal in the 1960s. To the public, they are at best those images in-
serted in terrestrial atlases and printed encyclopedias by the force of tradition,
not very meaningful in themselves. Perhaps they prove some point—only we
do not know exactly what. Do they demonstrate that the moon is rocky and
rugged? Do they remind us “we” were there? Or do they prove a kind of inter-
nal point, which is that “we” can create maps of wherever we please, including
of the moon? I am inclined to think this last alternative may be closer to the
truth, even if I have no means to prove it. To support my point, however, I think
we can go back to the previous practices of representing the moon that were
examined in this essay and ask: if it seems difficult to fathom the “whys” of
present-day lunar maps, was there any time when it was easy to do so?
The answer is obviously not. To go back to a point made right at the start,
maps of the moon have never performed in the same way as their terrestrial
counterparts. Let us recite once again: moon maps do not guide anyone from a
place to another, they do not play a role in settling border disputes, they are of
no help to invaders, conquerors or the like, they do not carry real claims of sov-
ereignty over people and places etc. Even during the hasty years of the Apollo
Program, it was for just a handful of people that the maps meant something
more than what was encapsulated in their material form. Here lies the whole
point: maps of the moon have always meant more than what they immediately
Maps of the Moon 87

materialized for just a handful of people. These people have varyingly been
astronomers, wealthy patrons, collectors, readers of astronomical treatises,
surveyors, perhaps some navigators, certainly astronauts. Lunar maps were
firmly conditioned by the surrounding practices of terrestrial cartography and
conventions of visual representation, but also presented a few problems of
their own, the most pressing of which was how to represent time, as I hope
to have shown. It may seem paradoxical, but it is precisely by virtue of their
specificity—social, cultural, technical—that maps of the moon have some-
thing to say for historians of cartography at large. Unencumbered by any kind
of expectation about how they should operate, one may profitably look back at
terrestrial cartography from its lunar counterpart.
Incidentally, it is this inverted gaze that Hans Blumenberg identified as the
far-reaching philosophical consequence of the Space Age. Barely one year after
the Sputnik flight, as a young philosophy professor at the University of Kiel,
Blumenberg was prompted by colleagues to apply for research funding, some-
thing they took to be an end in itself. With no real need for funding at that
moment, Blumenberg submitted an ironical project: he was to lay the founda-
tions of a new discipline called “astronoetics,” to compete with the increasingly
powerful field of astronautics. As recounted by Benjamin Lazier, Blumenberg
“proposed to do what Sputnik could not: he would explore the dark side of the
moon by ‘pure thought’ alone” (Lazier 2011, 620). But what started as a jest be-
came deadly serious for Blumenberg through the 1960s, as the Space Age came
into full being, especially after the wide distribution of a picture of the earth
taken in December 24, 1968, by an astronaut aboard the Apollo 8 mission (the
first crewed flight to orbit the moon).
The photograph shows a distant earth, rising over a lunar horizon. It has
been reproduced thousands, perhaps millions of times, to the point that it may
have become difficult for us to grasp its impact. It was the first picture of the
earth from that far, from inside a spacecraft not orbiting our planet. This was
the ultimate representation of the centrifugal, outwards (and out-worldly) im-
petus Blumenberg ascribed to the Space Age. The earth had been represented
from this point of view an uncountable number of times before, but it was
only at this moment that it had finally been seen from such a distance. What
Blumenberg realized was that the image of the terrestrial globe had always
been “noetic,” the result of pure thought alone, but not any longer. He would
then write that, “[i]t is only as an experience of turning back, that we shall
accept that for man there are no alternatives to the earth” (Blumenberg 1987,
685). Only after experiencing the centrifugal push of the Space Age did hu-
mans finally give in to the centripetal pull of the earth itself, at last seeing the
place they had come from, and from which there was no real escape.
88 Haddad

Different from the far side, and different, above all, from the “face of the
earth” itself, the visible side of the moon was never out of the reach of our eyes.
It was not accessible only by “pure thought,” and the consequences of this fact
on the ways the moon has been mapped, and how those maps were viewed,
are open for exploration. I think they include the question of time I have been
pursuing throughout this essay. But, most importantly, if we had to experience
the most radical deterritorialization to finally see our planet, whose global car-
tographic image had already been in the making for centuries (cf. Cosgrove
2001), it is not unreasonable to expect that by (metaphorically) placing our-
selves on the moon, through its maps, we might also learn something about
the maps of our own earth.

Bibliography

Alexander, Amir. 1998. “Lunar Maps and Coastal Outlines: Thomas Hariot’s Mapping of
the Moon.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 29: 345–368.
Andrews, J. H. 1996. “What was a Map? The Lexicographers Reply.” Cartographica 33
(4): 1–11.
Andrews, J. H. 2001. “Introduction: Meaning, Knowledge, and Power in the Map
Philosophy of J. B. Harley.” In The New Nature of Maps. Essays in the History of
Cartography, by J. B. Harley, edited by Paul Laxton, 2–32. Baltimore and London:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Aubin, David, Charlotte Bigg and H. Otto Sibum (editors). 2010. The Heavens on Earth:
Observatories and Astronomy in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture. Durham,
N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 2010.
Austin, John L. 1962. How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Biagioli, Mario. 1993. Galileo courtier. The practice of science in the culture of absolutism.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Bigg, Charlotte. 2018. “Of Blurs, Maps and Portraits: Photography and the Moon.” In
Selene’s Two Faces: From 17th Century Drawings to Spacecraft Imaging, edited by
Carmen Pérez González, 114–146. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Bloom, Terrie. 1978. “Borrowed Perceptions: Harriot’s Maps of the Moon.” Journal for
the History of Astronomy ix: 177–122.
Blumenberg, Hans. 1987. The Genesis of the Copernican World. Translated by
Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press.
Bosmans, Henri F. 1903. “La Carte Lunaire de Van Langren conservée aux Archives
Générales du Royaume, à Bruxelles.” Revue des Questions Scientifiques 54: 108–139.
Bosmans, Henri F. 1910. “La carte lunaire de Van Langren conservée à l’Université de
Leyde.” Revue des Questions Scientifiques 67: 248–264.
Maps of the Moon 89

Bouza, Fernando. 2008. “Realeza, aristocracia y mecenazgo [del ejercicio del poder
modo calamo].” In Mecenazgo y humanidades en tiempos de Lastanosa. Homenaje
a Domingo Ynduráin, edited by Aurora Egido and José Enrique Laplana, 69–88.
Zaragoza: IFC-IEA.
Bredekamp, Horst. 2000. “Gazing hands and blind spots: Galileo as draftsman.” Science
in Context 13 (3–4): 423–462.
Bredekamp, Horst. 2007. Galilei der Künstler: Der Mond. Die Sonne. Die Hand. Berlin:
Akademie Verlag.
Brooks, Randall C. 1991. “The Development of Micrometers in the Seventeenth,
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” Journal for the History of Astronomy xxii:
127–173.
Cassini, Jean Dominique [Giovanni Domenico]. 1730 [1692]. “Observation de l’Eclipse
de Lune du 28 Juillet dernier, avec une Méthode pour determiner les longitudes
par diverses Observations d’une mème Eclipse interrompuës & faites en differ-
ens lieux.” In Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences depuis 1666 jusqu’à 1699,
Tome X, 150–158. Paris: Par la Compagnie des Libraires.
Classen, J. 1969. “The First Maps of the Moon.” Sky and Telescope 37: 82–83.
Cohen, I. Bernard. 1982. “The Influence of Theoretical Perspective on the Interpretation
of Sense Data: Tycho Brahe and the New Star of 1572, and Galileo and the Mountains
of the Moon.” Annali dell’Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze 6 (1): 3–13.
Cosgrove, Denis. 2001. Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western
Imagination. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Cressy, David. 2006. “Early Modern Space Travel and the English Man in the Moon.”
The American Historical Review 111 (4): 961–982.
Crowe, Michael J. 1988. The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750–1900: The Idea of a Plurality
of Worlds from Kant to Lowell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison. 2007. Objectivity. Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books.
Edgerton Jr., Samuel Y. 1984. “Galileo, Florentine ‘Disegno’, and the ‘Strange Spotted­
nesse’ of the Moon.” Art Journal 44 (3): 225–232.
Edney, Matthew H. 1999. “Reconsidering Enlightenment Geography and Map Making:
Reconnaissance, Mapping, Archive.” In Geography and Enlightenment, edited by
David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, 165–198. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Edney, Matthew H. 2007. “Mapping Empires, Mapping Bodies: Reflections on the
Use and Abuse of Cartography.” Treballs de la Societat Catalana de Geografia 63:
83–104.
Edney, Matthew H. 2019. Cartography: The Ideal and its History. Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press.
Favaro, Antonio (editor). 1929–1939. Edizione nazionale delle opere di Galileo Galilei,
Firenze: G. Barbèra.
90 Haddad

Forbes, Eric G. 1967. “Life and work of Tobias Mayer (1723–1762).” Quarterly Journal of
the Royal Astronomical Society 8: 227–251.
Forbes, Eric G. 1970a. “Tobias Mayer (1723–1762): A Case of Forgotten Genius.” British
Journal for the History of Science 5 (1): 1–20.
Forbes, Eric G. 1970b. “Tobias Mayer’s Contributions to the Development of Lunar
Theory.” Journal for the History of Astronomy i: 144–154.
Forbes, Eric G. 1972. “Tobias Mayer’s method for calculating the circumstances of a
solar eclipse.” Annals of Science 28 (1): 177–189.
Forbes, Eric G. 1980. “Tobias Mayer’s Contributions to Observational Astronomy.”
Journal for the History of Astronomy xi: 28–49.
Frängsmyr, Tore, J. L. Heilbron and Robin E. Rider (editors). 1990. The Quantifying Spirit
in the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Franz, Johann Michael. 1750a. “Vorrede.” In Kosmographische Nachrichten und
Sammlungen auf das Jahr 1748. Vienna: Joh. Paul Krauss.
Franz, Johann Michael. 1750b. “Vorschläge, wie die Erdbeschreibung in Absicht
Deutschlands zu verbessern sey.” In Kosmographische Nachrichten und Sammlungen
auf das Jahr 1748 (Part II: Kosmographische Sammlungen auf das Jahr 1748), 348–396.
Vienna: Joh. Paul Krauss.
Gachard, Louis-Prosper. 1845. “Lettre de Philippe IV à l’infante Isabelle, touchant
­certains luminaires découverts au ciel par Michel-Florentius Van Langren.” Bulletins
de l’Académie royale des sciences et belles-lettres de Bruxelles XII: 261–262.
Geppert, Alexander C. T. (editor). 2018. Limiting Outer Space: Astroculture after Apollo.
Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave MacMillan.
Gierl, Martin. 2013. “Change of Paradigm as a Squabble between Institutions: The
Institute of Historical Sciences, the Society of Sciences, and the Separation of Cultural
and Natural Sciences in Göttingen in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century.”
In Scholars in Action: The Practice of Knowledge and the Figure of the Savant in the
18th Century, Volume 1, edited by André Holenstein, Hubert Steinke, and Martin Stuber,
in collaboration with Philippe Rogger, 267–288. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Gingerich, Owen. 1975. “Dissertatio cum Professore Righini et Sidereo Nuncio.” In
Experiment and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution, edited by M. L. Righini Bonelli
and William R. Shea, 77–88. New York: Science History Publications.
Graney, Christopher M. 2015. Setting Aside All Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and
the Science against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo. Notre Dame, IN.: University of
Notre Dame Press.
Guignard, Laurence. 2014. “Le « tourment lunaire » de Jules Pierrot-Deseilligny.
Pratiques amateurs d’observation de la Lune.” Romantisme 166 (4): 65–78.
Harley, J. B. 1988a. “Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early
Modern Europe.” Imago Mundi 40: 57–76.
Maps of the Moon 91

Harley, J. B. 1988b. “Maps, Knowledge, and Power.” In The Iconography of Landscape:

Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and use of Past Environments, edited
by Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, 277–312. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Harley, J. B. and David Woodward. 1987. “Preface.” In The History of Cartography, Volume 1:
Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean,
edited by J. B. Harley and David Woodward, xv–xxi. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Hiatt, Alfred. 2002. “Blank Spaces on the Earth.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 15 (2):
223–250.
Houzeau, Jean-Charles. 1852. “Extrait des notes prises à la Bibliothèque Royale, à Paris,
en mars 1844.” Bulletins de l’Académie royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts
de Belgique. XIX: 497–507.
Hevelius, Johannes. 1647. Selenographia: sive, Lunae Descriptio. Gedani [Gdansk]: typis
Hünefeldianis [Hünefeld].
Howard, Deborah and Malcolm S. Longair. 2011. “Elsheimer, Galileo, and The Flight
into Egypt.” In The Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena VI, edited by Enrico
Maria Corsini (ASP Conference Series, Vol. 441), 23–29. San Francisco: Astronomical
Society of the Pacific.
Jacob, Christian. 2002. Review of Ewen A. Whitaker, Mapping and Naming the Moon: A
History of Lunar Cartography and Nomenclature (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Imago Mundi 54: 165–166.
Jacob, Christian. 2006. The Sovereign Map. Theoretical Approaches in Cartography
Throughout History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Jacob, Christian. 2011. “La cartographie au telescope: la lune, de Galilée à Riccioli.” In
Les lieux de savoir 2, Les mains de l’intellect, edited by Christian Jacob, 606–633.
Paris: Albin Michel.
Johns, Adrian. 1998. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press.
Kagan, Richard L. 2005. “‘La Luna de España’: Mapas, ciencia y poder em la época de los
Austrias”. Pedralbes 25: 171–190.
Keuning, Johannes. 1956. “The Van Langren Family.” Imago Mundi 13: 101–109.
Klinkerfues, Wilhelm (editor). 1881. Tobias Mayer’s grössere Mondkarte nebst Detail­
zeichnungen, zum ersten Male herausgegeben. Gottingen: E. A. Huth.
Kopal, Zdenek and Robert W. Carder. 1974. Mapping of the Moon: Past and Present.
Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co.
Kopal, Zdenek. 1969. “The Earliest Maps of the Moon.” The Moon 1 (1): 59–66.
Kremer, Richard L. and Jarosław Włodarczyk (editors). 2013. Johannes Hevelius and
His World: Astronomer, Cartographer, Philosopher, and Correspondent (Studia
92 Haddad

Co­pernicana XLIV). Warsaw: Polish Academy of Sciences; Institute for the History
of Science, Copernicus Center for Interdisciplinary Studies.
Lane, K. Maria D. 2010. Geographies of Mars: Seeing and Knowing the Red Planet.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Law, John and Solveig Joks. “Indigeneity, Science, and Difference: Notes on the Politics
of How.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 44 (3): 424–447.
Lazier, Benjamin. 2011. “Earthrise; or, The Globalization of the World Picture.” The
American Historical Review 116 (3): 602–630.
Lewis, Martin W. and Kären E. Wigen. 1997. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of
Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lois, Carla. 2015. “El mapa, los mapas. Propuesta metodológica para abordar la plurali-
dade de la imagem cartográfica.” Geograficando 11 (1).
Lois, Carla. 2018a. Terrae Incognitae. Formas de pensar y mapear geografias desconocidas.
Buenos Aires: Eudeba.
Lois, Carla. 2018b. “¿Geopolíticas de mundos efímeros?” Terra Brasilis (Nova Série) [On
line], 10 | 2018, URL: http://journals.openedition.org/terrabrasilis/3377; DOI 10.4000/
terrabrasilis.3377.
Mayer, Tobias. 1750a. “Beobachtungen einiger Zusammenkunften des Monds mit
Fixsternen, im Jahr 1747 und 1748 zu Nürnberg in dem homännischen Hause an-
gestellet.” In Kosmographische Nachrichten und Sammlungen auf das Jahr 1748
(Part II: Kosmographische Sammlungen auf das Jahr 1748), 41–51. Vienna: Joh. Paul
Krauss.
Mayer, Tobias. 1750b. “Abhandlung über die Umwälzung des Monds um seine Axe, und
die scheinbare Bewegung der Mondsflecken.” In Kosmographische Nachrichten und
Sammlungen auf das Jahr 1748 (Part II: Kosmographische Sammlungen auf das Jahr
1748), 41–51. Vienna: Joh. Paul Krauss.
Mayer, Tobias. 1750c. Bericht von den Mondskugeln, welche bey der kosmogra-
phischen Gesellschaft in Nürnberg, aus neuen Beobachtungen verfertiget warden.
[Nuremberg]: zu finden in der Homännischen Officin.
Montgomery, Scott L. 1999. The Moon and the Western Imagination. Tucson: The
University of Arizona Press.
Montucla, Jean-Étienne. 1802. Histoire des mathématiques, Tome IV (edition completed
and expanded by Jérôme Lalande). Paris: Henri Agasse.
Müller, Kathrin. 2010. “How to Craft Telescopic Observation in a Book: Hevelius’s
Selenographia (1647) and its images.” Journal for the History of Astronomy xli: 355–379.
Nasim, Omar W. 2018. “James Nasmyth on the Moon: Or on Becoming a Lunar Being,
without the Lunacy.” In Selene’s Two Faces: From 17th Century Drawings to Spacecraft
Imaging, edited by Carmen Pérez González, 147–187. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Nicholls, Mark. 2012. “Last Act? 1618 and the Shaping of Sir Walter Ralegh’s Reputation.”
In Thomas Harriot and his world: mathematics, exploration, and natural philosophy in
early modern England, edited by Robert Fox, 165–182. Farnham, Surrey, U.K.: Ashgate.
Maps of the Moon 93

Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. 1948. Voyages to the Moon. New York: McMillan.
Oestmann, Günther. 2002. “Astronomischer Dilettant oder verkanntes Genie? Zum Bild
Johann Hieronymus Schroeters in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte.” In Astronomie von
Olbers bis Schwarzschild: Nationale Entwicklungen und internationale Beziehungen
im 19. Jahrhundert (Acta Historica Astronomiae, Band 14), edited by Wolfgang R.
Dick and Jürgen Hamel, 9–24. Frankfurt: Verlag Harri Deutsch.
Oestmann, Günther. 2011. “The reconstruction and production of Tobias Mayer’s lunar
globe.” Globe Studies 57 (58): 37–48.
Ostrow, Steven F. 1996. “Cigoli’s Immacolata and Galileo’s Moon: Astronomy and the
Virgin in Early Seicento Rome.” The Art Bulletin 78: 218–235.
Paluzie i Borrell, Antoni. 1967. “Historia de la Cartografía Lunar.” Urania 266: 203–271.
Panofsky, Erwin. 1954. “Galileo as a Critic of the Arts: Aesthetic Attitude and Scientific
Thought.” Isis 47 (1): 3–15.
Pereda, Felipe and Fernando Marías. 2002. “Introducción: El Atlas del Rey Planeta:
Felipe IV y Pedro Texeira.” In El Atlas del Rey Planeta: La “Descripción de España y
de las costas y puertos de sus reinos” de Pedro Texeira (1634), edited by Felipe Pereda
and Fernando Marías, 9–28. Hondarribia: Editorial Nerea.
Pérez González, Carmen (editor). 2018. Selene’s Two Faces: From 17th Century Drawings
to Spacecraft Imaging. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Pigatto, Luisa and Valeria Zanini. 2001. “Lunar Maps of the 17th and 18th Centuries.
Tobias Mayer’s Map and its 19th-Century Edition.” Earth, Moon and Planets 85–86:
365–377.
Pineda de Ávila, Nydia. 2017. Selenographies in the seventeenth century: making, pub­
lishing and copying maps of the moon. Doctoral dissertation. School of English and
Drama, Queen Mary, University of London.
Post, J. B. 2001. “A Map by Any Other Name.” Mercator’s World 6 (5): 36–37.
Pumfrey, Stephen. 2009. “Harriot’s maps of the Moon: New interpretations.” Notes and
Records of the Royal Society of London 63 (2): 163–168.
Raposo, Pedro P. M. 2018. “One World is Not Enough: Remarks on the History of
Selenography.” In Selene’s Two Faces: From 17th Century Drawings to Spacecraft
Imaging, edited by Carmen Pérez González, 34–60. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Ré, Pedro and Carmen Pérez González. 2018. “From Astronomer-photographers to
Astronaut-photographers: Close-up Detailed Observations Performed by Spacecraft
and Manned Exploration of the Moon.” In Selene’s Two Faces: From 17th Century
Drawings to Spacecraft Imaging, edited by Carmen Pérez González, 230–273. Leiden
and Boston: Brill.
Reeves, Eileen. 1997. Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in the Age of Galileo.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Righini, Guglielmo. 1975. “New Light on Galileo’s Lunar Observations.” In Experiment
and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution, edited by M. L. Righini Bonelli and
William R. Shea, 59–76. New York: Science History Publications.
94 Haddad

Sheehan, William and Richard Baum. 1995. “Observations and inference: Johann
Hieronymous Schroeter, 1745–1816.” Journal of the British Astronomical Association
105 (4): 171–175.
Sheehan, William and Thomas A. Dobbins. 2001. Epic Moon: A History of Lunar
Exploration in the Age of the Telescope. Richmond, VA.: Willmann-Bell.
Sicard, Monique. 2013. “L’Atlas photographique de la Lune, de MM. Loewy et Puiseux.”
Revue de la BNF 44 (2): 36–43.
Smits, Jan. 2009. “Cartifacts, a Completely Different Kind of Map!” Journal of Map &
Geography Libraries 5 (2): 177–186.
Spiegel, Richard J. 2015. “John Flamsteed and the turn of the screw: mechanical un-
certainty, the skilful astronomer and the burden of seeing correctly at the Royal
Observatory, Greenwich.” British Journal for the History of Science 48 (1): 17–51.
Van de Vyver, Omer. 1971a. “Lunar Maps of the XVIIth Century.” Vatican Observatory
Publications, 1 (2): 71–114.
Van de Vyver, Omer. 1971b. “Original Sources of Some Early Lunar Maps.” Journal for the
History of Astronomy ii: 86–97.
Van der Krogt, Peter. 1995. “Das ‘Plenilunium’ des Michael Florent van Langren.”
Cartographia Helvetica 11: 44–49.
van Gent, R. H. and Albert Van Helden. 2007. “Lunar, Solar, and Planetary Repre­
sentations to 1650.” In The History of Cartography, Volume 3: Cartography In The
European Renaissance, edited by David Woodward, 123–134. Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press.
Van Helden, Albert. 1974. “The Telescope in the Seventeenth Century.” Isis 65 (1): 38–58.
Van Helden, Albert. 1994. “Telescopes and Authority from Galileo to Cassini.” Osiris 9:
8–29.
Van Langren, Miguel Florencio. 1644. La Verdadera Longitud por Mar y Tierra:
Demostrada y Dedicada a su Majestad Catholica Philippo IV. Antwerp?: [?].
Vertesi, Janet. 2007. “Picturing the moon: Hevelius and Riccioli’s visual debate.” Studies
in History and Philosophy of Science 38: 401–421.
Weinek, Ladislaus. 1890. “Drawings of the Moon.” Publications of the Astronomical
Society of the Pacific II (10): 201–214.
Wepster, Steven. 2010. Between Theory and Observations: Tobias Mayer’s Explorations of
Lunar Motion, 1751–1755. New York: Springer.
Whewell, William. 1837. History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present
Times, Volume II. London: John W. Parker; Cambridge: J. and J. J. Deighton.
Whitaker, Ewen A. 1978. “Galileo’s Lunar Observations and the Dating of the Com­
position of ‘Sidereus Nuncius’.” Journal for the History of Astronomy ix: 155–169.
Whitaker, Ewen A. 1989. “Selenography in the seventeenth century.” In The General
History of Astronomy, Volume 2: Planetary astronomy from the Renaissance to the rise
Maps of the Moon 95

of astrophysics, Part A: Tycho Brahe to Newton, edited by R. Taton and C. Wilson,

119–143. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Whitaker, Ewen A. 1999. Mapping and Naming the Moon: A History of Lunar Cartog­
raphy and Nomenclature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Widmalm, Sven. 1990. “Accuracy, Rhetoric, and Technology: The Paris-Greenwich
Triangulation, 1784–1788.” In The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century, edited
by Tore Frängsmyr, J. L. Heilbron and Robin E. Rider, 179–206. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Willis, Artemis. 2017. “‘What the Moon is Like’: technology, modernity, and experience
in a late-nineteenth-century astronomical entertainment.” Early Popular Visual
Culture 15 (2): 175–203.
Winkler, Mary G. and Albert Van Helden. 1992. “Representing the Heavens. Galileo and
Visual Astronomy.” Isis 83 (2): 195–217.
Winkler, Mary G. and Albert Van Helden. 1993. “Hevelius and the visual language
of ­astronomy.” In Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen
and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe, edited by J. V. Field and
Frank A. J. L. James, 97–116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Włodarczyk, Jarosław. 2011. “Libration of the Moon, Hevelius’s Theory, and its Early
Reception in England.” Journal for the History of Astronomy xlii: 495–519.
Wolfschmidt, Gudrun. 2013. “Mondtopographie und Längengrad.” In Tobias
Mayers Beiträge zur Wissenschaft des 18. Jahrhunderts, edited by E. Anthes and
A. Hüttermann, 161–210. Leipzig: Akademische Verlag.
Zittel, Claus. 2002. “Begründungsprobleme empirischer Wissenschaft an der Schwelle
zur Aufklärung: Der Fall Hevelius.” In Das geistige Leben in Preußen in der Zeit der
Frühaufklärung, edited by Christoph Marx and Barbara Sapala, 9–25. Olsztyn:
Biblioteka Inst. Filologii Germanskiej, Uniw. Warminsko-Mazurskiego.