Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas Of The Near Side Of The Moon

Removes the scanning artefacts and transmission imperfections to produce a most comprehensive and beautifully detailed set of images of the lunar surface. To help practical astronomers, all the photographs are systematically related to an Earth-based view. Organized to make it easy for astronomers to use, enabling ground-based images and views to be compared with the Orbiter photographs.

The far side of the Moon, also called the "dark side of the Moon" was unknown to humanity until the Luna and Lunar Orbiter pictures were returned to Earth. This wonderful book contains beautiful photographs and newly-assembled mosaic images of the far side of the Moon, cleaned of transmission, imaging stripes and processing artifacts by today’s computer technology. Byrne’s superb analysis documents the appearance of the features of the far side with beautiful pictures from Lunar Orbiter. Until now, the far side Lunar Orbiter photos have only been available with strong reconstruction lines, but appear here for the first time as complete photographs, unmarred by imaging and processing artifacts.

"This book is a companion to Byrnes's award-winning Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Near Side of the Moon (Springer, 2005). It provides comprehensive coverage of the far side of the Moon, and is the first book that collects photographs from all five Lunar Orbiter missions: Clementine, Apollo, Luna, Zond, and Nozomi. As in the previous book, the scanning artifacts of the Lunar Orbiter photos have been cleaned."--Publisher's Web site.

Featuring 388 high-resolution photographs and concise descriptions of the Moon's topography, this atlas is an indispensable guide for amateur astronomers and astrophotographers.

This most recent book from lunar expert Charles J. Byrne combines the latest comprehensive imagery, topography and gravity data from all three recent Moon missions, Kaguya, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and GRAIL. These major polar-orbit surveys are presented here in compact form for the convenience of amateur and practical astronomers concerned with the Moon. Chosen from the Near and Far Side's large craters and basins over 200 km in diameter, each of the 71 highlighted features is depicted with a two-page presentation of the data that includes false color topographic maps next to the mission images. Additionally, the features are presented in the estimated chronological sequence of their creation, based on a consideration of stratigraphy (overlapping layers from neighboring features) and the relative degradation of surface features. Using this sequence as a way to convey the relative ages of lunar features, the author presents various theories concerning the Moon’s impact and thermal history e.g. the available evidence allows for constraints to be placed on the duration of the Late Heavy Bombardment period. The relationships between impact dynamics and variations in the gravity field of the Moon are also discussed. The new mission data makes possible this renewed conjecture about the history and evolution of the Moon, which is presented here with much worthwhile information for amateurs and professionals alike.

The purpose of this photographic atlas is to make available to scientists and to the interested public a comprehensive sample of photographs from the first three Apollo lunar missions. This atlas contains photographs of almost every type of feature and terrain that exists on the lunar surface.