Abstract
The Moon is a unique object on our sky. It has also turned out to be a unique type of satellite in the solar system: in fact, together with Earth, part of a double planet. Some researchers believe that the Moon stabilized earthly climate, and therefore made both life and the appearance of man possible. The cyclical changes of the Moon shaped human perception of time. Due to its proximity, the Moon was, for both fable-makers and visionaries, the first stop on our journey into the cosmos. And rightly so! This year we have celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first manned Moon landing. Needless to say there are myriad other reasons for why the Moon has had such a significant impact on the science and culture of various epochs. Selene’s Two Faces is yet another attempt to deepen and widen our understanding of this phenomenon.
The book is composed of nine essays and appended with several pages of chronology reporting the history of lunar photography from 1608 (!) till 2010. As the title suggests, the essential part of the volume is the iconographic material – 100 illustrations from various epochs and cultures. For example, one essay is devoted to the Moon in Persian astronomy in the second half of the nineteenth century, and another to Japanese lunar drawings, maps, and photographs before the 1870s. The temporal scope of the essays indicates that the book contains texts written from various methodological perspectives, although case studies predominate.
In Chapter 1, Pedro M. P. Raposo seeks to account for the great complexity of the history of selenography. Chapters 2 and 3 treat the above-mentioned studies on Asian scientific pursuits: Carmen Pérez González focuses on a short period of the history of astronomy in Iran (1848–1896); Tsuko Nakamura surveys the development of selenography in Japan from the beginning of the seventeenth century till the first photos of the Moon. Chapter 4, “Of Blurs, Maps and Portraits” by Charlotte Bigg, deals predominantly with nineteenth-century lunar photography in Europe and in the United States. In Chapter 5, Omar W. Nasim offers an extensive case study of the way James Nasmyth developed his three-dimensional models of the Moon’s surface and their photos, a project which produced the illustrations found in the well-known book The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite (1874). (Note that these illustrations continue to enjoy popularity. Nasmyth’s lunar landscape appeared on the publishing blog of the Royal Society on 16 July 2019 and was also used to illustrate the article by James Gleick in the special issue of New York Review of Books on 15 August 2019.) Chapter 6 offers another case study by Michael Geffert who analyzes lunar photographic observations made at Bonn Observatory in the early twentieth century. In Chapter 7, Detlef Groote sets the photos of the Moon made in Hamburg Observatory (c. 170 plates) in a wider context of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century digitization processes of astro-photographic plates. The book ends with an overview, by Pedro Ré and González, of photographic observations of the Moon performed by spacecraft.
In the extensive introduction, a thought-provoking essay in its own right, González stresses the interdisciplinary profile of the book and highlights its main topics, with lunar photography at the centre. The selection of topics reflects editorial preferences; the manner of presenting these topics results from the individual approaches of the respective authors. With these constraints in mind, I would like to offer several comments.
Raposo’s chapter is a valuable reading for anyone who would like to get to know the history of selenography in a nutshell, sparring them the effort of going through the monumental work by Ewen A. Whitaker. 1 The selected case studies widen our knowledge or simply to look at certain things from a novel perspective. A good example is the essay on James Nasmyth’s Moon, with some very interesting analyses of the development process of lunar models and photos, though in fact devoid of any reference to the contemporaneous assumptions about the origin and nature of the Moon which were binding for Nasmyth and which he discussed in his book. In the case of the essays on Persian Astronomy and the Hamburg astro-photographic plates, the studies of the Moon appear to constitute a rather inadequate percentage of the whole if one considers the overall profile of the volume. In Chapter 3, both the discussion of possible European inspiration for Japanese lunar drawings and the attempt to assess the quality of Masatami’s lunar map (1813) with the help of astronomical software of unknown accuracy call for more elaborate handling. And the overview of the history of lunar photography by unmanned and manned missions lacks any references to the literature about the Soviet space programme.
Even though the book certainly does not keep the promise made in the subtitle and it fails to present a complete and well-arranged history of selenography “from 17th century drawings to spacecraft imaging,” it does offer some in-depth analyses of certain aspects of the studies of lunar surface which go beyond “Selene’s two faces.” All in all, I am placing it on my shelf next to the studies by Whitaker, Scott L. Montgomery, William P. Sheehan, and Thomas A. Dobbins (as well as some well-composed companions to lunar iconography). 2 And I gratefully acknowledge that the new edition of my own study on the natural and cultural history of the Moon 3 will be enriched by some new insights from this volume. Setting aside the specific subject of the Moon and its pictures, González’s collection provides an excellent example of how astronomical imaging can overstep the boundaries of traditionally understood history of science.