![]() ![]() Larson and undergraduate John Fountain laboriously brightened the areas near shadow and dimmed the brighter parts of the surface by hand. At the terminator, sunlight hits the moon at a low angle, allowing the scientists to capture subtle variations in the lunar topography, Larson said.īut the high contrast and dramatic lighting near the moon’s terminator made imaging the lunar surface features tricky. Kuiper and his team created the Consolidated Lunar Atlas by carefully focusing the telescope on the moon and systematically snapping thousands of film photos along the moon’s terminator, the boundary between sunlight and darkness. “We were funded by NASA to record high resolution images of the moon, but we also took images of Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn to monitor changes in atmospheres." “That was our main project for the first couple years after the construction of the 61-inch telescope,” Larson said. The telescope is now managed by the university's Steward Observatory and bears Kuiper’s name. The fourth atlas was comprised of the highest resolution images taken from the ground, most of which were taken using the NASA-funded 61-inch telescope perched atop Mount Bigelow in the Catalina Mountains north of Tucson. Larson established the Catalina Sky Survey and has worked under every LPL director since the lab’s inception. “The 1967 Consolidated Lunar Atlas was the last in the series of Gerard Kuiper,” said Steve Larson, who was one of Kuiper’s undergraduate research assistants and is now a senior staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, or LPL. A sign in front of half-globe reads "keep yer mitts off" in pseudo-Russian. The resulting images revealed lunar features as they would appear from the perspective of an astronaut flying overhead.įour years later, Kuiper produced yet another lunar atlas.Įwen Whitaker, Gerard Kuiper and Ray Heacock are pictured in front of a Ranger model and lunar hemisphere, which is now located at the Flandrau Science Center and Planetarium at the University of Arizona. Hartmann, a first-year graduate student at the time, was tasked with snapping photos of the hemisphere from different angles. ![]() To accomplish this, Kuiper mounted a 3-foot-wide white hemisphere at the end of a hallway and projected glass plate photographs of the best images of the moon onto it. The third atlas allowed humans for the first time to see what features on the moon’s edges, called limbs, looked like without distortion. The Rectified Lunar Atlas, published in 1963 by the University of Arizona Press, went a step further. ![]() Astronomers used these while observing the moon telescopically. The Photographic Lunar Atlas and the Orthographic Atlas of the Moon, which included a coordinate grid, were published in 19, respectively. Kuiper and his team collected the best available telescopic photos of the moon from observatories around the world and used them to produce the first two atlases while working at the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin. The UA's Space Sciences building was completed in the fall of 1966. Kuiper, already a leader in planetary science by the time he arrived in Tucson in 1960, sought to understand Earth’s celestial neighbor and worked for years to create multiple lunar atlases with the best photographs of the moon. Moreover, moon maps at the time were drawn by hand, and the names of many features remained unsettled. “To most 1950s astronomers, the planets did not seem very interesting, and there weren't very useful techniques for studying them.” “Back then, astronomers were interested only in objects outside our solar system,” Hartmann said. Hartmann and PSI co-founder Don Davis, another alumnus, also proposed that the moon was born from a giant impact with the Earth. “Classic astronomers regarded the moon as an annoyance that lit up the night sky, making it hard to study the faintest stars and galaxies,” said William Hartmann, one of Kuiper’s first graduate students and co-founder of the Planetary Science Institute, or PSI, in Tucson. Gerard Kuiper, the father of modern-day planetary science, led the team and established the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona. The team imaged and mapped the lunar surface, which allowed them to understand the moon’s geology and NASA to choose landing sites for future robotic and Apollo missions. Among them was a small group of researchers at the University of Arizona. Kennedy announced in 1961 that Americans would walk on its surface by the decade’s end. Only a handful people were seriously studying the moon when President John F. (Courtesy of Lunar and Planetary Laboratory) William Hartmann projected photographic plates of the moon onto a white hemisphere to create the Rectified Lunar Atlas.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |