The Far Side of the Moon

The Far Side of the Moon.- The Spacecraft Missions and Images.- The History of the Moon and its Features.- Regions of the Far Side.- Nomenclature and Conventions of this Book.- The Western Far Side Region: Earth-rise, Tsiolkovskiy, Gagarin, and the Mendeleev Basin.- The Korolev Basin Region.- The South Pole-Aitken Basin and the South Polar Region.- The Northwestern Far Side Region: The Moscoviense Basin.- The Eastern Far Side Region: Birkhoff to Hertzsprung.- The North Polar Far Side Region.- The Orientale Limb Region.- The Near Side Megabasin.

Charlie Byrne worked as a systems engineer at Bellcomm, for support of the Lunar Orbiter project. He is currently carrying out research about the Moon, and was the discoverer of the gigantic "near side megabasin" that covers nearly all of the near side of the Moon and whose ejecta has established the shape of the far side of the Moon.

From the reviews:

"Our name for the half of the Moon that doesn't face Earth - the farside - conveys a feeling of unreachable distance and strangeness. The farside has remained poorly known and little in the thoughts of either amateur or professional astronomers. Partly that is because we have had few good images of it, and the existing ones are hard to use. Now Charles Byrne has assembled images from Lunar Orbiter, some from Clementine and a small handful from Soviet and Japanese probes to create a photographic guide to the lunar farside. Those familiar with his 2005 Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Near Side of the Moon will feel at home in this companion volume. This Guide has the same advantages and drawbacks - it has a whole hemisphere of images in one convenient book, the annoying lines between Orbiter framelets have been removed, and there are interpretive captions. But the image scale varies from page to page, and it is difficult to find the pages for a feature of interest without using the names index. Few people other than professional lunar researchers probably need an atlas of the farside of the Moon, although it would spark interesting conversations when visitors spied it on a coffee table. But saying only professionals might need it ignores amateur astronomers and other dreamers who routinely buy books showing gorgeous views of features on Mars, which they will never see at the telescope. I am happy to add the new Byrne to my lunar library. But I also await a more homogeneous future atlas, perhaps compiled from Kaguya, Chang'e, and dare I hope, SMART-1 images. " Chuck Wood, LPOD (21 Jan 2008)

"This book covers the Moon's dark side, and showcases many of the features imaged by the five US Lunar Orbiter probes of the mid 1960s. ... Byrne, who worked on the Lunar Orbiter programme, has gone through the archives thoroughly, and his choice of images is excellent. ... . All things considered, this is a thoroughly recommended lunar work." (Peter

From the reviews:

"Our name for the half of the Moon that doesn't face Earth - the farside - conveys a feeling of unreachable distance and strangeness. The farside has remained poorly known and little in the thoughts of either amateur or professional astronomers. Partly that is because we have had few good images of it, and the existing ones are hard to use. Now Charles Byrne has assembled images from Lunar Orbiter, some from Clementine and a small handful from Soviet and Japanese probes to create a photographic guide to the lunar farside. Those familiar with his 2005 Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Near Side of the Moon will feel at home in this companion volume. This Guide has the same advantages and drawbacks - it has a whole hemisphere of images in one convenient book, the annoying lines between Orbiter framelets have been removed, and there are interpretive captions. But the image scale varies from page to page, and it is difficult to find the pages for a feature of interest without using the names index. Few people other than professional lunar researchers probably need an atlas of the farside of the Moon, although it would spark interesting conversations when visitors spied it on a coffee table. But saying only professionals might need it ignores amateur astronomers and other dreamers who routinely buy books showing gorgeous views of features on Mars, which they will never see at the telescope. I am happy to add the new Byrne to my lunar library. But I also await a more homogeneous future atlas, perhaps compiled from Kaguya, Chang'e, and dare I hope, SMART-1 images. " Chuck Wood, LPOD (21 Jan 2008)

"This book covers the Moon's dark side, and showcases many of the features imaged by the five US Lunar Orbiter probes of the mid 1960s. ... Byrne, who worked on the Lunar Orbiter programme, has gone through the archives thoroughly, and his choice of images is excellent. ... . All thingsconsidered, this is a thoroughly recommended lunar