MAPPING THE MOON IN BLACK AND WHITE

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.

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.

This globe’s Index and Guide provides basic background on the Moon and a several-page-long index of named features.  

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.  

The US Air Force (USAF) had established their expertise in mapping the Moon before NASA’s formation. Throughout the 1960s, therefore, NASA relied on the USAF to produce increasingly accurate and precise maps of the Moon at various scales. 

Somewhere between a map and a photograph, the “USAF Lunar Mosaic” consists of pieces of 24 photographs that shared a common angle of light from the Sun. Air Force cartographers then copied the photographs to a consistent scale and placed them according to control points that they gathered from the recently published Orthographic Atlas of the Moon (1961). This mosaic did not, however, do any of the selection, interpretation, or processing that, as Gerhard Falk argued in the map you saw earlier, make maps vital resources. 

A division of the USAF, the Aeronautical Chart and Information Center (ACIC) operated mainly in St. Louis. In late 1961, a small group set up at the Lowell Observatory in New Mexico to create maps of the Moon. The USAF and NASA assigned them a region anticipated for the Apollo missions, from 50° E and W and 16° N and S.

At Lowell, William Cannell and James Greenacre did most observations with the 24 in. telescope. Patricia Bridges, the principal cartographer, combined these observations with photographs to create lucid maps with an airbrush that retained the feel of photographs. As the Lowell team grew, they began to use motion picture cameras to augment the work of human observers. The LAC series remained the most detailed lunar maps at NASA until the photography from the orbital missions.

The Army Map Service (AMS) spent six years producing this topographic map of the Moon. The AMS confronted a series of technical questions to map the Moon using stereophotogrammetry—a method of mapping where you calculate heights in a region based on small differences in photographs of the same area taken from different angles. To get these photographs, the AMS used the Moon’s libration in longitude to their advantage. The Moon’s elliptical orbit means that at different times the Moon exposes up to almost eight degrees more of the edges of its far hemisphere. 

But, with these photographs, the AMS had to adjust all its equipment that had been finely tuned to map the Earth to fit photographs of the Moon. These adjustments included raising the projectors of the photographs five times higher and creating an adjustable, curved—rather than a fixed, flat—surface on which to trace from these photographs.

The six, crewless Lunar Orbiter missions provided the best photography of the entire Moon that had ever been available. For the first time, humans made maps of an entire hemisphere hidden to Earth-bound telescopes. The enthusiasm for the map, however, outpaced the authorized names for farside features. This first edition published in January 1970 almost completely lacks these names. NASA published a second edition in October incorporating the newly approved names from the International Astronomical Union General Assembly that August. 

In depicting the farside, ACIC’s cartographers changed the direction of the shadows for the shaded relief from western lighting—as was conventional for the earthside maps—to eastern lighting. This change made the map more intuitive for what Apollo astronauts would see orbiting the Moon.

This map combines Mercator and stereographic projections to present a map of the entire Moon. The mid-section of the Moon 45° above and below the equator appears as a rectangle while the regions north and south of those sections sit above as circular maps. This choice foregrounds the area of the Apollo 11 landing in the Mare Tranquillitatis just right of center in the rectangular section. It also pushes many of the newly mapped areas that lacked official names to the margins. 

Originally published in March 1970, NASA overprinted on the original map in purple in August 1970 to add an astonishing number of names that were being proposed to the International Astronomical Union for features on the poles and farside of the Moon. 

NASA and its administrators understood from the beginning that the continued success of their missions required not just technical acumen but good marketing. NASA and the mission to walk on the Moon would only exist so long as enough of the US public, senators, and representatives believed in the wonder and heroism of the project. Strategic partnerships with magazines like Life and sustained relationships with press agencies effectively sold both the science and the theater of the lunar landing to journalists and readers alike. 

NASA’s success, in turn, led many private companies to market their projects through the Space Race. Companies from Boeing to Brillo saw the opportunity in hitching their brands to the rockets headed to the Moon in order to reach people on Earth.

Landing on the moon was not of interest only to the US and Russia. People all over the world watched the events on television, read about the people in newspapers, and followed the discoveries on new maps. 

For instance, Institut géographique national, France’s state geographical agency, published this large map of both sides of the Moon using data from NASA missions. In bold banners, the map shows the landing sites of Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 near the equator on the earthside hemisphere. Apollo 12 had finished in November 1969, very soon before the IGN published this map at the end of the year. The reddish coloring differs from the grays and blues that had filtered out from the ACIC’s maps to most US lunar maps. 

When it comes to Apollo 11, the majority of the world’s attention has always been on what happened on the Moon on 20 July 1969. Understandably so! For the first time, three Americans traveled through space, landed two on the Moon, and returned together to Earth.

But, the Space Race involved many more people than the three that left the Earth’s surface. And, while very little infrastructure remained on the Moon and in orbit after Apollo 11, this mission and the Apollo program created lasting infrastructure on Earth. From the space centers in Florida and Texas, which launched and followed Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins, to the Pacific Ocean that welcomed them back, the Earth and its maps changed because of the Apollo missions.  

Active between 1957 and 1966, Launch Complex 14 is one of over 40 launch pads built for NASA’s many rockets of different sizes. While Apollo 11 launched from Complex 39A, Mercury-Atlas 6, which carried John Glenn as the first US astronaut into orbit, traveled from Complex 14. 

These two views of the same area show the intricacy involved in designing a facility that needs to withstand the incredible force of rockets carrying large crewed and crewless crafts into orbit. 

To learn more, or to see this exhibit in person, come visit us at the Harvard Map Collection in Pusey Library, Harvard Yard.

To see more digital exhibits by the Harvard Map Collection, click on the links below!