364 Seiten
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Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
Sprache: Englisch
Anspruch: III-IV
astro-shop Verkaufsrang: 258


Artikelgruppe: Sonnensystem

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Die Zeit der Mondforschung vor dem Raumfahrtzeitalter ist bisher selten Gegenstand eines Buches gewesen und wenn, dann nur als Einführung zu aktuellen Ergebnissen. Das ist mit dem vorliegenden Buch anders geworden. Es konzentriert sich vollkommen auf die Erforschung der Mondoberfläche nach der Erfindung des Teleskops.

Selbst in den frühen Teleskopen zeigten sich auf dem Mond bereits so viele Details, daß ganze Forscherkarrieren nötig waren, sie alle zu erfassen, aufzulisten, zu benennen, zu vermessen, zu zeichnen und in Karten des Mondes einzutragen. Schnell versuchten sich die Beobachter auch daran, das Gesehene zu erklären und es waren Jahrhunderte nötig, bis es zu einem akzeptierten Bild des Mondes in der wissenschaftlichen Gemeinschaft kam.

Die Geschichte dieser Forschung zeichnen die Autoren nach. Jede Periode der Mondforschung wird vorgestellt: die herausragenden Forscher, die vorherrschenden Theorien, die verwendeten Instrumente, die Ergebnisse in Form von Karten und Zeichnungen des Mondes. Ein schönes Beispiel für die Entwicklung der Naturwissenschaften bis hin zu einem Punkt, wo auch ohne direkte Erkundung durch Raumfahrzeuge ein sehr weitreichendes Verständnis des Mondes und seiner Entwicklung erreicht wurde.

Dass dieser Weg nicht immer gerade sein konnte, wird in dem Buch auch sehr deutlich, wenn es um die Diskussion der Fragen nach Leben auf dem Mond oder Veränderungen in den beobachteten Strukturen geht. Ebenso erkennt man, dass die beiden konkurrierenden Erklärungsversuche für die Form der Mondoberfläche - Vulkane oder Meteoriteneinschläge - lange Zeit gleichberechtigt nebeneinander standen, bis es gelang, eindeutige Entscheidungen zu treffen.

Im Zuge des wiedererwachten Interesses von Amateuren am Mond ist dieses Buch sehr zu empfehlen, zeigt es doch die vorderste Front der historischen Mondforschung, die sich heutzutage leicht mit amateurastronomischen Mitteln nachvollziehen läßt.

The Moon has always been one of the most obvious and in some ways the most enticing astronomical objects – even from early times, it was Queen of the Night, and the naked eye sees more detail than even the largest telescopes reveal on Mars.

As early as 1609 Galileo’s first telescope showed the Moon to be another world. The Moon has thus been the object of intense study not only since the 1960s but for at least the previous three and a half centuries. The eye arrived before the boot. By the same token, the first “race to the Moon” was not undertaken by American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts but by German and British selenographers in the nineteenth century, who mapped lunar detail so painstakingly that by 1878 – the year Julius Schmidt of the Athens Observatory published his great Moon map and also the year that Congress organized the United States Geological Survey and assigned to it the task of making large-scale maps of the United States and its territories – it could be said without exaggeration that the earthward hemisphere of the Moon had been depicted in greater detail and with more precision than many parts of the American West were depicted in existing maps of the time.

In part, the reason for the long preoccupation with lunar surface details lay in the fact that the mapping of the Moon provided a form of therapy for astronomically inclined obsessive personalities, whose monomaniacal tendencies were drawn to the seemingly inexhaustible project of recording the multitudinous features visible in even a six-inch telescope. In part, too, it lay in the partiality of selenographers for the project – first systematically pursued by Johann Schroeter, the Lilienthal magistrate, at the end of the eighteenth century – of discovering evidence of minor changes in the lunar surface. What became a Promethean quest for changes – veils, clouds, landslips, eruptions – was initially tied in with the theory that the lunar surface features had been formed by volcanic eruptions; however, it curiously survived the demise of the volcanic theory and still shows intermittent gasps of life in the largely amateur-driven search for transient lunar phenomena, or TLP.

The long era of pre-Apollo lunar studies is a fascinating subject that has never been told in detail. “No other book, recent or not-so recent, is devoted to the history of lunar studies with telescopes” (Clark R. Chapman). Though there was a lapse of interest in the Moon in the immediate post-Apollo era, there has been a recent “return to the Moon” with the successful Clementine and Lunar Prospector missions. There is also growing evidence of a return of amateur observers to the Moon as an object worthy of their attentions. This is understandable inasmuch as the Moon remains the most accessible planetary realm; it is, moreover, the only alien world open to geological prospecting from the eyepiece of the backyard telescope.

In that sense, this book is – like the Moon itself – both timely and timeless. The story of mankind’s endless fascination with the world of the Moon and the gallery of interesting characters who pursued the details of the lunar surface with often strange intensity is a modern-day epic. Many of the stories recounted for the first time here will still be recounted generations hence, when the Apollo explorations may seem a mere interlude in what has actually been a more sustained and more significant era of endeavour. It is possible that the names of Schroeter, Beer and Madler, Webb and Schmidt may prove to be as memorable as those of Armstrong, Aldrin, Cernan and Schmitt.

A psychiatrist with a lifelong interest in astronomy, William P. Sheehan is a contributing editor of Sky & Telescope magazine, a member of the History of Astronomy Division of the American Astronomical Association, and a consultant to Committee 41 (History) of the International Astronomical Union. His previous books include Planets and Perception, the definitive history of the Martian canal controversy; The Immortal Fire Within, a critically acclaimed biography of the astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard; and In Search of Planet Vulcan (with Richard Baum). Sheehan is a 2001 fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a prestigious award given to artists, scholars and scientists “on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.”

Thomas A. Dobbins is a keen observer of the Moon and planets and a contributing editor of Sky & Telescope magazine. He is the co-author of Introduction toObserving and Photographing the Solar System (with Donald C. Parker and the late Charles F. Capen) and Video Astronomy (with Steve Massey and Eric Douglas). Dobbins, the Director of Research for a chemical manufacturing firm, holds patents in diverse fields ranging from chemical processing and rocket propulsion to acoustic amplifier design.

From Sky & Telescope"s

Review in the

February 2002 issue



How can I say more than perfect? Epitome, quintessence, nonpareil? Within my lifetime there have been only a handful of guys—one of them my former boss, Joseph Ashbrook—who could have pulled off such a brilliant, accurate synthesis of the history of lunar mapping and the concomitant search for change, something that would make the Moon worth watching. Here, with William Sheehan and Thomas Dobbins, we get two of the savants at once! From Galileo to Clementine, if you want to know how the Moon was unmasked, it"s all here and delivered in captivating, beautiful prose.



.... Epic Moon is nicely produced, and it is illustrated with gobs of relevant illustrations, many of them new to me. ....



..... If a classic can be born as such, this is it.



Leif Robinson, former Editor-in-Chief of Sky & Telescope

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