VMA is a very powerful piece of software that serves up an impressive array of options and capabilities. If you prefer a computerized Moon map, then you can do no better than Patrick Chevalley and Christian Legrand’s Virtual Moon Atlas. Both are useful, and provide a great way to get an overview of the Moon and to see lunar features in context.Ī good Moon map is key to finding your way on the lunar surface. Although pricey, the pair are much more than attractive display items. The atlas is spiral bound, which makes it easy for you to use at the eyepiece of your telescope.Īlso utilizing LRO data, Sky & Telescope recently produced a pair of lunar globes - one showing the Moon as we’re accustomed to seeing it, in “visible light,” the other using an array of bright colours to display lunar topography. Unlike the Rükl atlas, this one utilizes spacecraft imagery from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to depict the lunar surface with 36 beautifully produced, highly detailed charts covering the entire Earth-facing hemisphere of the Moon. It has quickly become my go-to field reference. ![]() There is even a version for telescopes that have a mirror-reversed orientation (refractors and Schmidt-Cassegrains using a “star diagonal” right-angle eyepiece adapter).Ī new Rükl alternative is the 21st Century Atlas of the Moon by Charles A. Unlike Rükl’s atlas, this map has the advantage of being relatively inexpensive and available. This big laminated map presents a 22-inch-wide lunar disk divided into four sections that can be folded several ways to allow you to examine a single quadrant, two adjacent quadrants, or the whole lunar disk at once. (You can just make out Drago, Scorpio and Andromeda before your head starts to hurt.First there’s Sky&Telescope’s Field Map of the Moon, which also features Rükl’s handiwork. It is a celestial navigational globe, a rendering made by the Russian navy of the so-called celestial sphere that surrounds the earth, with all relevant stars and constellations articulated, executed in yellow plastic and aluminum and lettered in Cyrillic. “Really, it looks like a kitchen appliance,” he said. But to his eye, the collection’s apogee (to use space lingo) is one that looks as if it doesn’t belong in the same gallery. Despont has plenty of valuable space junk, like an early 17th-century moon atlas. 12.)ĭecades after starting to collect, Mr. Despont and works by two other artists, Manolo Valdés and Claudio Bravo, in lavish 18th- and 19th-century period rooms, opens at a gallery space at 6 Harrison Street in TriBeCa on Nov. (“Cabinet de Curiosités,” a lavish and unusual show, which sets sculptures by Mr. His art-making reflected it, expanding from paintings of imaginary planets to his latest works of fanciful found-object sculptures that imagine what the inhabitants on said planets might look like. Or, as he put it, “from first sight to first step.”īut as his moon-gazing progressed, he found himself increasingly drawn away from history and toward fantasy. He collected moon charts and moon models, and books spanning the ages, from Galileo’s time to the 1969 moon landing. He decided to stick closer to home, and focus on the moon. “When you think about everything we know about the universe,” he said, “it’s a bit mind-boggling.” But he found that he couldn’t really see much with it, and so traded it in for a better one. As a teenager growing up in Limoges, France, he asked for and got a telescope. When he was a boy, his favorite adventure of Tintin was the one in which the intrepid youth went to the moon. Despont has dreams of his own, and they aren’t even terrestrial. While being the plutocracy’s favorite manorist is a splendid spot to occupy, Mr. It all seemed to add to his profile as a gentleman architect of another era, offering his clients not just a place to live, but a way to live. He studied drawing in school and began painting and making sculptures a decade or so ago. Since he first studied architecture, at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he has been a self-cultivated Renaissance man. Every detail in his TriBeCa offices has been considered and refined to its highest plane, including Mr. ![]() Despont, 63, has stood atop the short list of America’s great-house architects for nearly 20 years. Despont dream them up and execute them on their behalf. A lucky few can afford to have someone like Thierry W. Most of us come up with them and cobble them together ourselves.
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