In the 1970's, I had the honor of working with Bill Hartmann, Bob Strom, Gerard Kuiper, Clark Chapman and Ewen Whittaker, at Tucson's Lunar & Planetary Labs. They used large earthbased telescopes to photograph the moon's surface at many illumination angles and libation angles. The images were captured on glass plates.
They physically projected these images onto a large plaster sphere; in turn, they rephotographed the images from different angles, to remove foreshortening and show the lunar surface as seen from directly above a crater.
I'm always really impressed with the clever techniques and methods to accurately map topographic surfaces (in this case, lunar) before computerization. Really interesting!
(and your comment reminded me to finally place my order for a Klein bottle!)
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In the 1970's, I had the honor of working with Bill Hartmann, Bob Strom, Gerard Kuiper, Clark Chapman and Ewen Whittaker, at Tucson's Lunar & Planetary Labs. They used large earthbased telescopes to photograph the moon's surface at many illumination angles and libation angles. The images were captured on glass plates.
They physically projected these images onto a large plaster sphere; in turn, they rephotographed the images from different angles, to remove foreshortening and show the lunar surface as seen from directly above a crater.
One result of this is the Rectified Lunar Atlas -- one of the guiding maps of the Apollo missions: https://sic.lpl.arizona.edu/collection/rectified-lunar-atlas
I'm always really impressed with the clever techniques and methods to accurately map topographic surfaces (in this case, lunar) before computerization. Really interesting!
(and your comment reminded me to finally place my order for a Klein bottle!)