“Earth rais’d up her head”

  
“Earth rais’d up her head,

From the darkness dread & drear.”

from William Blake, “Earth’s Answer”

(Sketch based on first Earthrise image from the Moon, taken by Lunar Orbiter 1 on Aug. 23, 1966.)

A Trip to the Moon

Text borrowed from the 1728 “A Trip to the Moon” by Murtagh McDermot (pseudonym) to create a poem.  The background is a closeup from an original NASA-LRC Lunar Orbiter II poster I purchased at an observatory yard sale.

A Study in Butterfly Wing-Venation: Redacted Poem

This article, “A Study of Butterfly Wing-Venation,” appeared in the 1907 volume “Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections.” I have heavily redacted it to create a poem. The faint picture in the upper right is a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) photo of an impact site on the moon with butterfly ejecta pattern. (Some speculate that this is the impact site of Lunar Orbiter 2, which impacted the surface in 1967.) Photo credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

Chiaroscuro (Light-Dark) #2

First photo of Earth from the Moon, taken by Lunar Orbiter 1 on August 23, 1966. Credit: NASA.

Proposing
to the attention
of every one

a nuanced
crater

and a long corridor
of dust and rock

leading
inevitably
to a night sky

somewhere else

and blackness
with a soft touch
smudging away
clouds.

Mystery solved!

Major thanks to Francis Reddy–science writer on contract with the Astrophysics Science Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md–for solving the mystery of the Lunar Orbiter poster I purchased from the University of Maryland Observatory yard sale!  (The complete backstory of this poster is provided in the earlier post “We interrupt this poetry blog to bring you a mystery.”)

Here’s the information from Francis and a copy of the poster which he so kindly labelled:

“Here’s the solution to your Lunar Orbiter challenge. This is a Lunar Orbiter II medium-resolution image taken 44 km above Sinus Medii. The centerpoint of the image is not far from the Surveyor 4 & 6 landing sites (the region of both sites is included in the shot, which may explain why it was significant enough to someone to survive). I’ve attached a version with a few labels for features I could securely identify. More info:

Mission:               Lunar Orbiter 2

Spacecraft Position:

Altitude:              44.19 km

Latitude:              4.15°

Longitude:          -0.31°

Principal Point (seems to correspond to the center of the horizon for this oblique view):

Latitude:              0.21°

I’m including a Digital Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Moon photo (Photo Number IV-097-M) for the view from 2700 km away. (Credit: NASA)

Longitude:          -1.10°

Illumination:

Sun Azimuth:     90.39°

Incident Angle:                 78.00°

Emission Angle:                72.31°

Phase Angle:      76.23°

Alpha:   -24.68°

Link to frame and higher-res images of the area:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/lunarorbiter/frame/?2093

USGS maps based on Lunar Orbiter imagery, with named features (Sinus Medii straddles the equator, hence two maps needed):

http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/images/Lunar/lac_59_lo.pdf

http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/images/Lunar/lac_77_lo.pdf“