November 18, 2012

No Longer Secret

Occasionally over the last few months an LPOD image was said to have been processed for a secret project. The secret is out, Maurice Collins and I have created a new photographic atlas of the Moon. As long-time LPOD readers may remember I have often discussed the desired characteristics of a new atlas, and our 21st Century Atlas incorporates a lot of them. We call it the 21st Century Atlas of the Moon because it is based on mosaics from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter - the amazingly successful spacecraft that, along with Kaguya, is finally taking the understanding of the Moon significantly beyond Apollo era data. What makes our atlas different - and better - than existing ones? Its use of LRO WAC images gives it uniformly high resolution for the nearside, and special charts provide rectified views of the limbs, low illumination depictions of major lunar basins and their ridge systems, and synoptic high Sun views of the nearside and LRO quadrants of the farside. The Atlas has 108 8.5" x 11" pages and is spiral bound, yielding good image scale and convenience for use at the telescope or a desk. Like all previous lunar atlases it optimizes the features important to its authors, and hopefully to many others. I'd like to thank NASA's Dr. Richard Vondrak, the LRO Mission Scientist, who encouraged the creation of this new atlas. This atlas is self-published, meaning that Maurice and I are responsible not just for the content but also the layout, the printing, fulfillment of orders - and misidentification and spelling errors. This is exciting and scary but a wonderful experiment that we hope will be successful. I am already thinking of future books to publish. Here is the link to see a few sample pages and to order the Atlas. Chuck Wood Sunday morning update: The first order for the Atlas appeared soon after LPOD was posted last night, and there are now 15 orders, largely from Europe. As Earth rotates I look forward to more orders from the US and the rest of the world. This is exciting! Monday morning update: There are now 48 orders! Dec 1, 2012 update: There are now over 100 orders! Yesterday's LPOD: A Skyfull of Stars Tomorrow's LPOD: Oranges And Mustard COMMENTS? Register, Log in, and join in the comments.