joe_haldeman @ 2011-04-25T13:42:00

 [Oh, fiddling with that drawing, I neglected to paste in the text that was supposed to accompany it . . . ]


Moonlight drew me outside before dawn, and I spent a pleasant hour drawing a nice mid-sized crater, Albategnius. It’s a curious kind of satisfaction; any kid with a telescope and a camera could snap a more accurate shot. Of course that’s true of figure studies, too.

In that regard, it’s not just a picture of a crater. It’s a picture of where I was this morning in time. Sort of straddling the earth and the moon. (When figure drawings and landscapes turn out well, they carry a kind of time-tripping power, too – I look at the picture and remember the day.)

There are several more prominent craters, but Albategnius, by historical accident, appears to have been the first lunar crater drawn through a telescope. (It’s hard to say definitively, because Galileo’s engraver for the book Siderius Nuncius evidently took huge liberties, valuing prettiness over accuracy.)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Galileo%27s_sketches_of_the_moon.png

Joe