Moon atlas

[bish]

Can anybody suggest a decent moon atlas please? Thanks

[Astro Imp]

A lot of us use the Virtual Moon Atlas:- https://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualmoon/

This is a very good free atlas that you can configure so as to show the view as seen through your scope.

HTH.

 

[bish]

Thanks for that. I like free things!

[Dave In Vermont]

Great call, Alan! Again you beat me to my vast collection of freeware-links!

Virtual Moon Atlas is hands down the pick-of-the-litter, Bish - you'll love it!

Moonlit Skies -

Dave

[Paz]

If you are after a paper/book map, although Turn Left at Orion is normally talked about in terms of it's DSO descriptions and drawings, it actually has what I think is a really good section on the moon with maps showing the terminator at various phases and descriptions of the main features.

I've also got the 21st Century Atlas of the Moon which has more detail and the Phillips fold out Moon Map which lays it all out in one big sheet but I always go for Turn Left at Orion first when looking things up.

[StarSapling]

The Hatfield Lunar Atlas.

 

[michaelmorris]

IF you can find one at a sensible price, than Antonin Rukl's 'Atlas of the Moon' is widely recognised as probably the best lunar atlas in book form ever produced.  It is certainly my lunar atlas of choice.

 

[Paul M]

25 minutes ago, michaelmorris said:

IF you can find one at a sensible price, than Antonin Rukl's 'Atlas of the Moon' is widely recognised as probably the best lunar atlas in book form ever produced.  It is certainly my lunar atlas of choice.

 

I have that author's "Moon, Mars and Venus" it contains the famous lunar map "plates" along with some stuff on the other two objects.

It is the only book that I retained out of over a hundred after the big clear out 14 years ago. Everything else went to the local library.

 

EDIT: That's a lie. I also retained my Sky Atlas 2000 (Tirion).

[billyharris72]

On 19/03/2016 at 22:30, Paul M said:

I have that author's "Moon, Mars and Venus" it contains the famous lunar map "plates" along with some stuff on the other two objects.

This looks pretty useful, and it's on Amazon second hand. Have just ordered a copy for the princely sum of 1p.

[N3ptune]

The lunar field atlas, it's a free PDF, really nice and useful + wikipedia has details on everything.

http://www.astronomylogs.com/pages/moon.html

I don't bring any electronic screens outside to watch an atlas so I use a basic "Moon map" by "sky and telescope" it's 7$+tx to identify majors items on the moon. After I can do further research at home  in front of my computer, with no mosquitoes.

http://www.shopatsky.com/moon-map-laminated

 

[Putaendo Patrick]

Two more useful free resources are:

Alan Chu's Photographic Moon Book (referenced to Rukl's Atlas) http://www.alanchuhk.com/

and Kwok C. Pau's Photographic Lunar Altas for Moon Observers (Beware 700Mb pdf file!) http://lunaratlas.blogspot.cl/2016/02/photographic-lunar-atlas-for-moon.html

If you want to have some fun and delve a bit deeper, both the USA and the USSR produced some fantastic maps of the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s.

Quite a range of the American maps have been scanned and can be viewed and downloaded from the Lunar and Planetary Institute http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/mapcatalog/

Prof. Zdenek Kopal, a Czech/British astronomer at Manchester University, provided much of the original imagery taken with telescopes at the French Meudon Observatory. Mapping the Moon Past and Present by Kopal and Robert W. Carder (1974) provides a wealth of information. Ewen A Whitacker's more recent Mapping and Naming the Moon (1999) is also an excellent history.

The Soviet maps are more difficult to access. The International Planetary Cartography Database supposedly scanned a large number, but their site now seems pretty dead with none of the links opening - anyone know what happened? Lunar and Planetary Cartography in Russia by Vladislav Shevchenko, Zhanna Rodionova and
Gregory Michael (2016) provides the historical context to the maps.