Customer Reviews

Epic Moon: A History of Lunar Exploration in the Age of the Telescope

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The authors are to be commended on weaving together the lives and observations of three centuries of those people who dedicated great amounts of time and effort into studying our nearest celestial neighbor with the telescope. Interesting. exciting and unique is how I would sum up the telling of this facet of the history of Astronomy. Beginning with Galileo's first telescopic observations and culminating with Man's arrival on the moon this book tells it all. I was most impressed with the incredible amount of work that went into the mapping of the moon in ever increasing detail as telescopes became better and better. Enjoying the sketching of lunar formations at the eyepiece myself I can appreciate the size of the task of drawing the entire visible face of the moon as seen through a telescope. Yet this was done on several different levels of perfection by a very few observers and was the only record available before the invention of lunar photography came along. Not only is this a great history of lunar observation, but also tells the story of the history of the telescope. The wealth of pictures of the early telescopes is a delight in itself and adds a great deal to the text. I would most certainly recommend this book to anyone interested in the moon, or the history of astronomy. A well done to the authors. One of the authors is a psychiatrist and I assume it was his input which resulted in the emotions and thought processes of the characters in the book seeping out between the lines and made the book all the more enjoyable.It was also obvious that both authors are observers themselves.

I have enjoyed Sheehan's book from the first to the last page. The book includes images from the most prominent lunar atlases ever edited and a nice description of every map and its circumstances.