In 1967 space artist Ludek Pesek wrote 'Log of a Moon Expedition' a curious work which, when I encountered it in high school had the feel of being written much earlier.

Recently I've been trying to locate a copy of this book and his later Mars Expedition book 'The Earth is Near' and found a few pages scanned, including the map I'm linking to below. The map shows the area in which the story takes place and seems to be based on telescopic images. But is it of a real location on the lunar surface or did he make it up out of the whole cloth?

Map of a Moon Expedition

Very interesting map ... (what we really need a working 'image search engine' ...a million dollar app)
To all UMSFers who may not know this: if you are trying to find a hard-to-find space book (for example: 'The International Atlas of Lunar Exploration', by a certain P.Stooke) then goto: abebooks.com

Gndonald, there are 37 copies of 'Log of a Moon Expedition' there, from $3US to $30US
(search author: pesek, title: log) ... here is the cover:

Click to view attachment

By the way That Stooke fellow may be your only hope...
try this abebooks search:
author: stooke
title: lunar
results: 30 copies, $136 to $287!

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I'll give them a try, there is also a local second hand bookshop that offers search/ordering.

As a thank you I'll throw in this scan of the fronts-piece/cover illustration,

Fronts Piece (Source)

Interesting map. I hadn't seen it before. It looks like one of the Lunar Orbiter sites in Mare Tranquillitatis east of Censorinus (certainly not telescopic data). I'll do some comparisons later this morning.

Phil

Ok, it's fictitious, but Pesek was very well acquainted with the moon and contemporary imaging of it, and I think he's constructed his landscape out of some features imaged in Apollo sites. The broken crater rim near the middle looks very much like Maskelyne F in this map:

http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/images/Lunar/lac_61_lo.pdf

- but flipped left-right. Other features don't match that area, but this region around Apollo Site 1 (one of the five candidates for the first landing) looks a lot like Pesek's image except for the rilles, which he might have based on those near Triesnecker.

Phil

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Thanks,

I pulled up my copy of the LAC61 map and I can see what you mean about the region between Maskelyne F/Wallach and the highlands near Maskelyne C/P. Interesting that Pesek chose to do that on such a well mapped body (even in the early 60s), I'd guess he could not find anywhere that fit the requirements of the story he was writing.

He probably wanted a place with a greater concentration of interesting features than the moon actually offered - like the rilles along with the buried craters and highland boundary.

Phil

I think you've just invented a new science Phil - Lunar-cartographical forensics.

Nice.

CSI Moon?

Phil

It has been a very long time since this thread was added to, but I though this post on David S.F. Portree's blog Beyond Apollo about the "Log of a Moon Expedition" might be of interest. He identifies the location of the fictional landing site as Sinus Medii...

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/05/...xpedition-1964/