A Harvard Map Collection Digital Exhibition

The push to map the entire Moon and the mission to land on the Moon mutually reinforced each other. More than a decade of mapping allowed the Apollo program to select a location and enabled Buzz Aldrin to pilot the Lunar Lander onto the Sea of Tranquility. In turn, mapping the Moon with precision relied on the motivation and funding provided by the decade-long push to walk on the Moon. With this support, engineers and cartographers developed new tools and methods to map the Moon by using, for the first time, photographs taken from outside the Earth’s atmosphere.

While mapping the Moon involved unprecedented activity in outer space, it did not happen in a vacuum. Even as the US government fueled and financed the frenetic activity at National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), it also navigated sustained campaigns from Civil Rights groups such as the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign. These groups and leaders challenged the federal government’s allocation of tens of billions of dollars to the Space Race when so many in the US lived in poverty and lacked adequate housing.

Mapping the Moon in black and white, then, meant not just learning to create maps from the lights and shadows recorded in satellite imagery. It also meant mapping amid stark racial conflicts and for an agency that trailed many others in employing people of color. Only by seeing the whole landscape of the lunar cartography that landed a crew on the Moon can we appreciate the successes and failures, the costs and benefits, of this historic achievement.

Mapping the moon before the invention and application of photography involved long hours at a telescope. Even when cartographers began to use photography, the slow exposures needed for the night sky meant that lunar cartographers combined photography and their own observations. Techniques and technologies grew and layered on one another as people strived after a map of the whole—not just the full—Moon.

Mapping the Moon in Black and White focuses mostly on the 1960s, with just a few items to show the debt these cartographers had to earlier mapping. To learn more about early efforts to map the Moon and discover its properties—including those by Galileo, Newton, and many others—visit Houghton Library’s “Small Steps, Giant Leaps.”

Working for almost a decade, Johann Heinrich von Mädler made this huge survey of the Moon. In the map and the accompanying book, Der Mond (1837), Mädler established 105 control points as well as the details of 148 craters and 830 mountains. Mädler’s work remained the most influential map of the Moon for half a century until Julius Schmidt published his 195 cm (76.7 in) diameter map in 1879.

Mädler’s research relied on the financial support of the wealthy banker Wilhelm Beer. Beer had built a private observatory in Berlin that housed the 94 mm (3.7 in) telescope that Mädler used. By convention, moon mappers like Mädler drew the map in reverse as it appeared through the lens of the telescope. Therefore, Polus Australis—the southern pole relative to the Earth’s magnetic field—appears at the top of Mädler’s map.

This map of the Moon’s surface took as a guide the map by Wilhelm Beer and Johann Heinrich von Mädler that is the first map behind you on the gallery wall. Stieler reduced Beer and Mädler’s map to fit inside his popular atlas series.

Within a few decades, photography would fundamentally change how people mapped the Moon. By the turn into the twentieth century, observatories in Europe and the US undertook large experiments to photograph the Moon and produce maps based on those photographs. This combination of photography and telescopic observation dramatically improved the accuracy of maps and defined a new era in lunar cartography.

The Lick Observatory in California and the Paris Observatory were the first to publish extensive photographic atlases of the Moon. W. H. Pickering followed with his Photographic Atlas, based on photographs taken with instruments he and his team had brought to Jamaica. Pickering’s main innovation was to take 5 photographs of each overlapping position to depict each region at different orientations to the Sun.

Although people had occasionally made lunar globes before the Space Race, they necessarily lacked information about the farside of the Moon. Shortly before the Apollo 11 mission, NASA and Rand McNally each produced globes using recent imagery of the Moon’s more distant side.

Rand McNally, Lunar Globe Index and Guide, 1969.

To the right, V. A. Frisoff shows his method of making maps from “spherical projection photographs.” He relied on photography at multiple stages. He would create a map from a photograph by photographing a projection of the original photograph onto a white sphere to produce the Moon in “true spherical perspective”—a map that is a photograph of a photograph.

For the decades up to and through the Space Race, lunar cartography blended new techniques for taking photographs of the Moon with new methods of creating maps from those photographs. To the right, the Times Atlas of the Moon illustrates the photographic techniques of the Lunar Orbiters that developed their own photographs before transmitting the data down to Earth.

In his speech on the floor of the US Congress on 25 May 1961, President John F. Kennedy asked its members to allocate additional funding of almost $10 billion to NASA. With this funding, he set the goal of a crew landing on and returning from the surface of the Moon before the end of the 1960s. This deadline gave the Space Race a new urgency that funneled more and more resources into NASA and the other agencies involved in space research.

These agencies knew they would need large-scale maps of the Moon. They also knew that these maps would require new tools, new techniques, and new teams of cartographers. By the end of the decade, these lunar mappers had combined observations from telescopes, Earth-based photography, and satellite imagery to make the most precise and complete maps of the Moon ever made.

Building from the new data delivered by US and Soviet satellites, Gerhard Falk produced what he called a “picture map.” For Falk, the clearer images from these satellites allowed him, as a cartographer, to select and represent better the important aspects of the Moon in what he called a “vivid map.” Keeping with the older tradition of lunar mapping, Falk placed the South Pole at the top (as it would appear in a telescope).