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More and more countries achieve what until not too many decades seemed impossible: placing a satellite in The moon. To the difficult mission of sending a probe to hundreds of thousands of kilometers away we can add the double challenge of doing it in your hidden face, unlocked by China Some years ago. One side of the moon in permanent state of escapism to the naked eye.
Unlike the hidden face, the one that we can always observe from our homes has been a reason for study and analysis for endless astronomers from several centuries ago. And in such special ephemeris it is worth remembering the first time in which human knowledge drew the known surface of the moon. A Polish did it from the roof of his house, and it took five years to complete the feat.
We talked about Johannes Hevelius, Latinized form of Jan Heweliusz. Born in the current Gdańsk, once Danzig, Hevelius would publish in 1647 the first great Atlas of the Moon. Literally. His Selenographia, Sive Lunae Descriptionone of the most celebrated scientific books of the seventeenth century, compiled a good handful of detailed maps that disseminated among popular culture what other scientists and astronomers They suspected long ago.
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Heweliusz undertook his work, in part, to complete the unfinished and still imperfect designs by Galileo at the beginning of the century. Son of a rich merchant Cervecer, Heweliusz had to attend family businesses first before devoting himself fully to astronomy. It was his unusual social position and his great wealth that allowed him Build telescopes precise and long -range that would install on the contiguous roofs of their homes in Gdańsk.
Long night looking at the sky
Of methodical procedure, Heweliusz combined in its publication a technical knowledge very high with a Artistic sense More than respectable. Our man inspected the lunar surface every night, Drawing by hand The apprehended reliefs and moving them to a copper plate later. The process of observation, drawing and printing would have almost a five years before being able to finish such a titanic task.
With annotations.
The result of his work is admirable today. Hevelius’s moon is a hand -drawn moon with great aesthetic sense and, at the same time, enormous astronomical value. On your maps, Heweliusz He proceeded to baptize The topographic characteristics of the satellite from the geographical accidents of the Earth. The Polish interpreted bays, deserts and meanders where there were only craters. Years later, Toponymic work of Giambattista Riccioli and Francesco Maria Grimaldi four years later, in 1615, the baptisms of Hevelius would expire.
His maps, however, did survive, and served as a basis for many others elaborated by Other astronomers Europeans in later decades (such as Joanne Zahn in 1696 or Rost in 1723). Of course, the publication had A great tour and caused the usual scandal in the ecclesiastical estate. Hevelius, Polish and therefore Catholic, followed the teachings of another famous compatriot, Copernicus, and believed that the earth Orbitaba Around the sun.
Another map included by Hevelius.
At that time the representatives of God on earth were not in a position to accept the truth (a patent thing in their recent judgment to Galileo). So when Niccolo Zucchi, an Italian astronomer well related to the Vatican, gave Pope Innocent X a copy of the Selenographia from Hevelius his holiness He replied: “It would be a book without any comparison, of not having been written by a heretic.”
Since the Church would lose that game, the Selenographia Heweliusz would mark a before and after in our knowledge of the moon. The astronomer would advance other technical aspects of the telescope and, in addition, observe To other planets of the solar system (such as Jupiter or Saturn) to those who would baptize as “fixed stars.” Despite his privileged vision to the moon, he won the planets cataloging.
The astronomer would also leave sketches of his “fixed stars.”
Be that as it may, Hevelius’s work marked the imagination of Europeans to the moon during the coming centuries. Already in the 19th century and in the twentieth century the new technical advances would take us from the first high definition images of the lunar surface to the moon landing of 1969. Of course, Hevelius was far from the first occasion in The one we saw The hidden face: it was in 1959 thanks to a satellite Soviet.
Today we have closed a circle initiated largely by pioneers like Heweliusz, the astronomer enriched by beer.
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