— This is a guest post by Meagan Snow, a geospatial data visualization librarian in the Geography and Map Division. It also appears in the May/June issue of the Library of Congress Magazine. For thousands of years, the moon was an object of fascination across time, space and cultures. In 1610, Galileo Galilei first turned it into an object of scientific study, pointing his telescope to the moon and revealing a rugged world of mountains, valleys, craters and ridges. Some 350 years later, in a 1961 speech to Congress, President John F. Kennedy committed America to landing on the moon within a decade. Thus began an intense mobilization across government agencies to make it happen. Landing a man on the moon successfully was a challenge not just of technology but also of geography: Given the moon’s uneven topography, choosing a good landing site was of utmost importance. They would need a map. The Aeronautical Chart and Information Center, then the nation’s premier mapping agency for defense, mobilized for the task. The center employed experts in photogrammetry — the process for making accurate measurements from photos — who could transform aerial images to correct distortion, account for overlap among images and…
Creative
The Moon map that made history
Source: Library of Congress Blogs — US Government, Public Domain