History of the lunar charts

During the full moon in space, you can clearly see without auxiliary instruments that on the surface of the moon there are a lot of different spots that remind one of the image of several people and the other one of a bunny. These spots began to be called the seas of the Moon as early as the beginning of the 17th century. Astronomers of those times assumed that the terrestrial satellite has water, and, consequently, the sea with the oceans.

D. Riccioli - an Italian astronomer gave names to these seas and oceans, which are used today. In these names, the influence of the Moon on the climate changes occurring on the surface of the Earth was displayed. It turned out that all these judgments were fundamentally wrong. It is worth noting the "Sea Crises", whose name implied weather changes, and not the economic decline of the state. As for the light areas on the disk of the Moon, it was assumed that there is land.

Astronomer R. Boskovic in the middle of the 18th century proved the theory of the absence of an atmosphere on the Moon. When a satellite covers a star, it almost instantly disappears, but if there was an atmosphere, then the star would disappear gradually. Thus, it was proved that there can not be any water on the Moon, because in the absence of atmospheric pressure it would simply evaporate over a certain period of time.

Galileo Galilei established the fact that the moon is covered with mountains, among which clearly visible whole ridges. Astronomers decided to give them names similar to the terrestrial ones (Carpathians, Alps, etc.). However, on the surface of the earthly satellite, special mountains with a circular shape - craters, which in Greek means "chalice" - were seen.

D. Riccioli put forward the proposal to call these craters the names of famous scientists, fond of astronomy. Thus appeared the crater Plato, Ptolemy, Galileo, Riccioli and many others. Together with the names of such great people, there are those that are not even found by Google: Teofil, Autolycus, although these people were quite famous astronomers in their time. After Riccioli's death, the craters continued to give names: Delandra, Piazzi and even Darwin (not to be confused with Charles Darwin).

When in the Soviet Union began to seriously study the moon, it was decided to build interplanetary stations, with which they were able to capture the reverse side of the moon. Thus, the names of Soviet astronomers, astronauts and other scientists appeared on the maps of the earthly satellite: Gagarin, Mendeleev, Chebyshev, Lomonosov, Numerov and many others.