The Craters of the Lunar Landscape

Abstract

Titan is the furthest other-worldly landscape that we have seen. Our Moon is the closest, so close that some of its scenery was first described over four centuries ago. The Italian astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) turned his telescope to the Moon at the end of 1610, and was able to see its features clearly. In his book, Sidereal Messenger, he declared that “The surface of the Moon is not perfectly smooth, free from inequalities and exactly spherical, as a large school of philosophers considers with regard to the Moon and the other heavenly bodies, but that, on the contrary, it is full of inequalities, uneven, full of hollows and protuberances, just like the surface of Earth itself, which is varied everywhere by lofty mountains and deep valleys.”