![]() ![]() ![]() By 1613 he had created two maps of the whole Moon, with many identifiable features such as lunar craters that crucially are depicted in their correct relative positions. Not all of these are dated, but they show an increasing level of detail. Harriot went on to produce further maps from 1610 to 1613. The crude lunar sketch shows a rough outline of the lunar terminator (the line marking the division between night and day on the Moon, as seen from the Earth) and includes a handful of features like the dark areas Mare Crisium, Mare Tranquilitatis and Mare Foecunditatis. He turned it towards the Moon on 26 July, becoming the first astronomer to draw an astronomical object through a telescope. Harriot became a leading force in mathematics, working on algebraic theory and corresponding with scientists in the UK and across Europe.īy 1609, Harriot had acquired his first ‘Dutch trunke’ (telescope). In the early 1590s Raleigh fell from royal favour and was imprisoned in the Tower of London.įrom this time Harriot was passed to the patronage of Henry Percy, the Ninth Earl of Northumberland who was himself imprisoned as one of the Gunpowder Plotters in 1605 but continued to support Harriot in his residence at Sion (now Syon) Park, in what is now west London. He studied at St Mary’s Hall (now part of Oriel College), Oxford, achieving his BA in 1580 before becoming a mathematical teacher and companion to the explorer Sir Walter Raleigh. In a paper to be published in Astronomy and Geophysics, the journal of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), historian Dr Allan Chapman of the University of Oxford explains how Harriot not only preceded Galileo but went on to make maps of the Moon’s surface that would not be bettered for decades. ![]()
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