When Galileo announced the existence of mountains, craters, and "seas" on the moon in the spring of 1610, our view of the universe was forever changed. Since antiquity the moon had been considered a "heavenly" object, made of a perfect uniform substance, eternal, immune to change. Galileo saw the moon as a world, made of the same elements as our own planet. Galileo literally brought the heavens down to earth.

The consequences of this new view of the moon were several. In the larger sense, it caused the rapid demise of the doctrine that the celestial and terrestrial worlds were separate and irreconcilable realms. But in a smaller way, it also raised a host of new questions about the moon itself. If the moon is a world, what is it like? Can the surface be mapped? How shall we name the surface features? Does the surface change? Where did the craters and maria come from? Why is the lunar surface so different from that of earth?

This exhibition is concerned with the smaller set of questions, and with attempts to answer them in the three hundred and eighty years since Galileo's initial discoveries. We wish to show how the face of the moon has been variously delineated as telescopes were improved, new inventions such as photography were applied, and ultimately, as space travel led humankind to the very surface of the moon. It is remarkable how well the pioneer observers of the seventeenth century were able to see with their unwieldy 100-foot telescopes, and how beautiful their lunar engravings still appear. The detail of the great nineteenth-century visual atlases is also astonishing, and the beauty of the turn-of-the-century photographic atlases, printed in brilliant photogravure or collotype, is absolutely stunning. The splendor of all this selenographic history provides the perfect setting for the fruits of the Apollo decade, with its outpouring of Lunar Orbiter and Ranger photographs, U.S. Air Force and Geological Survey charts, and finally, the Apollo images themselves.

There are two special occasions that prompt the exhibition. One is the twentieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission that first placed humans on the lunar surface. The other is the Library's acquisition this year of the first edition of Galileo's MDUL Sidereus Nuncius MDNM of 1610, the book that so transformed our view of the face of the moon. It seems a natural and appropriate time to survey depictions of the lunar landscape in the period between Galileo and Apollo. All of the items displayed are from the collections of the Linda Hall Library.