Talk:Selenography

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From the article: Certain aspects of the Moon continue to baffle astronomers. It has been found that the full Moon, instead of having twice the illumination of the first or last quarter Moon, is in fact almost 19 percent brighter.

Why should it baffle anyone? I've never heard of such a "mystery" before, but the cause seems obvious to me. When we see the full Moon, the central area of its visible side reflects the solar light almost vertically to the Earth, so it looks brighter for us on the Earth. Dart evader 18:03, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

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[edit] Selongraphy vs. lunar geography

It is my opinion that the lunar community should stop replacing every instance of "geo" in a word with "seleno". While this might have made sense during the early space age, where the Moon was the first planetary object to be studied in any detail, this practice becomes absurd when applied to all the other planets and satelites. For instance, what do we call a cartographer of Pluto, Charon, Io, Venus, and Vesta? And what about the geoid of Europa, earthquakes on Io, and the geotherm of Venus? Do any of you know what the Areoid is? Lunokhod 18:43, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Recently the article entitled Areography was moved to Geography of Mars as well; perhaps Geography of the Moon would be a more appropriate title? Mlm42 11:30, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

It should be kept as the title it is. Granted, specific terms do not exist for every planet/ moon, but where they do they should be used. With regards to "Areography" the original author I do believe was pretty annoyed that you came along and changed the name of the aritcle. 15th March 2007

Just for the amusement factor alone, I googled up "selenography department" (with quotes) and received no hits. Literally, zero. Do I need to report how many hits I got for "geography department"? I will tell you that when I search for "lunar geography", I get 1700 hits and the top hits are all relevant, containing much information on the subject of this article. My conclusion is "selenography" as used here is a neologism. As per Lunokhod, this article needs to be renamed to "Lunar geography". mdf 21:39, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Linne

"Other mysteries concern lunar features that have apparently changed. One of the most famous cases concerns the lunar crater Linne in the are of Mare Serenitatis. In 1834, the German astronomer Lohrmann stated that the crater can be seen under all angles of illumination, and is the second most conspicuous crater on the Moon. The astronomer Johann Madler observed an interior shadow when the sun had attained an angle of 30 degrees, so the crater must be deep. Johann Schmidt also showed the crater on drawings during the years 1841–1843. Then on October 16, 1866, Schmidt observed that Linne had somehow disappeared. Where once was a larger crater, there was instead a small whitish patch. It remains like this to this day."

Is there a citation for this? And can this crater be seen in Apollo, Clementine, and lunar orbiter data? While this might be an interesting story, this needs to be better explained. I doubt that "Linne" disappeared, and that is "like this to this day". I am going to delete this, and wait for a citation or proof that this is indeed the case. Lunokhod 21:37, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

See Linné (crater) and Johann Friedrich Julius Schmidt. I believe this is fairly well documented. — RJH (talk) 16:41, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
But the lunar orbiter photo at Linné (crater) shows that the crater is still there. I think I need to research this a bit to find out exactly what Schmidt claimed to have happened. Regarding this, you should check out Transient lunar phenomena. I've been trying to get that page in order, but it's not done yet. Lunokhod 17:03, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Why

I would like to know how people are editing an article used by permission of the original author. None of you are the author - you have no rights to change the contents. - Kbc 19:37, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

The main page of Wikipedia clearly states "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." To ensure that contributions are not edited ad nauseum, it is always a good idea to include citations which can be used to verify the accuracy of the contribution. Lunokhod 05:48, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

I just got an email from the original author of the article, and he doesn't even want it on Wikipedia now, if it is going to be changed. He states that his original article was used by permission, and it was an already-published article. If someone wants to delete it, please do, now that it's been "merged." -- Kbc 18:48, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Dear Kbc, before uploading text to Wikipedia, you should have read the conditionst that you were agreeing to. In particular, it states that you are licensing your contribution under the GFDL licence and that you are not infringing upon any copyrights by doing so. Furthermore, the WHOLE POINT of wikipedia is that everything is in the public domain, and that ANYONE can edit it (I only repeat this because you seem not to have read my response to your previous post). At this point, it is too late to extract what you wrote, as it has already been modified and improved upon over the original contribution. I am sorry if the original author is not happy about this, but you both should have done some research about what wikipedia is before contributing to it. Lunokhod 19:02, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Merge proposal

FOR: I am for the merger because

  1. I think that both pages are somewhat weak. Combining both will make one better article
  2. I think the two subjects overlap. The page Selenography appears to be devoted more to the history of Selenography than "lunar geography". As such, the origin of lunar nomenclature should be considered under the historical portion of selenography.

Lunokhod 19:02, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

I was an early contributor to the "Origin of lunar nomenclature" page, and I agree it needs further development to be comprehensive. Merging the two makes sense. — RJH (talk) 20:13, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
I'm going to go ahead and merge the two. There is going to be some redundancy that will need to be taken care of, perhaps you want to do thi? If not I'll start on this next weekLunokhod 14:23, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
OK, its done. I think the first thing to do is shorten the "history" section.Lunokhod 14:40, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
This works. Thanks. — RJH (talk) 16:33, 30 November 2006 (UTC)