How do you map something 238,856 miles away? You can’t just send
out a team of surveyors. At least, you couldn’t until relatively
recently. Before then, lunar cartographers (technically,
selenographers) could only rely on telescopes and their own
artistic ability to draw a detailed portrait of the lunar face.
They managed some pretty dazzling results. One of the first
widely seen images of the moon (aside from the IRL version), the
drawing at left was included by Galileo in a book published in
1610. While he didn’t technically map the moon, these
observations were among the first to take note that the moon was
not a perfect smooth magic sky-ball but a rough, irregularly
surfaced rock with valleys and mountains and other chartable
features. The first formal attempt at mapping the moon—that is,
one that didn't just take note of curious craters and riveting
ridges, but attempted to define all features on a grid—happened
only a few decades later, in 1645. Dutch astronomer Michael van
Langren attempted a detailed