Below each photo is a careful description Team, give a tour of the most interesting objects on the moon's near side. The pictures, taken from the marvelous work of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Wood's long awaited 21st century lunar atlas does not disappoint. In summary, I'm sorry to say that I wouldn't recommend this atlas, regardless of how it's to be used, until it's reissued in another, hopefully corrected, edition which would put it on an equal footing with other references.Ĭharles A. The scale of the former allows better feature identification while the flexibility of the latter makes all paper-based atlases seem obsolete and best suited for a desk or coffee table.
Overall, I find that Sky & Telescope's Field Map of the Moon or, better yet, a computer-based atlas is much more practical for telescopic observing. Also navigating across charts can be frustrating. Features along chart borders are often sliced and an observer may find it hard to identify them or fail to notice their structure entirely. Specifically, there's no overlap between charts. So, there are a lot of things to like here and on balance, I'd call it the most useful photographic lunar atlas available.īut as a scope-side atlas, it suffers from the same complaint directed against Rukl's Atlas of the Moon, the standard paper-based lunar atlas for quite a few years. This atlas would be much easier to use scope-side than the Cambridge. It makes it an opportunity to learn some planetary geology and recognize the structural clues that reveal how a world was formed.Īlso praise-worthy, the quality of the photographic images and the organization of the area charts (twenty-eight large area charts) in this atlas are better than in the competing Cambridge Photographic Moon Atlas. It makes lunar observing more than an exercise in crater identification and aesthetics. That same approach can be found to an extent in this atlas. His descriptions of the processes that shaped the features we see on the lunar surface make that book a treasure. Speaking as a long-time lunar observer, I found Charles Wood's (the author of this atlas) The Modern Moon the most instructive book on our moon readily available. I believe it was a disservice to have released a reference book in this condition. This is the only time I've ever felt the need to do this with any brand new book. I immediately went through the book with a highlighter to try to salvage it as a reference tool. The page ends with a list of six "other errors", one of these mentions that two of the three craters commemorating the Apollo 11 astronauts have been mislabeled. There are five "errata", three of which are major and unforgivable: (1) a picture purporting to show crater Plinius in detail actually shows Eratosthenes (2) crater Cassini is printed aligned 180 degrees differently than all other features and (3) an image of the Caucasus Mountains is accompanied by a description of the "Alpes" Mountains, that erroneous name is itself a departure from the nomenclature adopted for mountain ranges in this atlas). The error page lists thirty-seven "typographical errors of lunar nomenclature", most on the charts themselves and in their index entries. In a book of only 111 pages, an entire page is given to listing errors in its text and maps. ?īriefly, this Atlas should have been edited thoroughly before being printed. With special maps of the limb and far side, LRO altimetry-based images of major basins and their mare ridge, and maps of the Apollo and Soviet landing sites, this guide offers a level of detail never before seen in an atlas of the Moon. The Atlas clearly provides unprecedented detail on more than one thousand named Moon features, while recommending additional features and images to observe. It is both accessible to the novice and valuable to the expert. With over two hundred Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images, the highest quality images of the moon ever taken, this atlas illustrates the Moon in high resolution. As an indispensable guide to telescopic moon observation, it can be used at the telescope or as a desk reference. For many, simply noticing it is a pleasure, yet it is also a fascinating world of craters, mountains, and volcanoes worthy of a closer look. The 21st Century Atlas of the Moon is uniquely designed for the backyard, amateur astronomer. On most nights and days, the Moon is visible somewhere in the sky.
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