MoonWatch on Marshall County Trail Celebrates 400^th Anniversary of First Telescopic Moon Drawing

Th1s Sunday evening, July 26^th, 2009 marks the 400^th anniversary of the first recorded drawings of an astronomical object through a telescope. The use of the telescope to study celestial objects is said to have helped to usher in the present age of scientific understanding of the universe. In celebration, members of a local informal astronomy coalition; ASTROLABE Astronomy Club, the Near Earth Object Foundation, and staff of the SMART-Center will bring telescopes, clipboards and paper for the general public to try their hand at making their own Moon map – 400 years to the day after the first sketch of the Moon was made with the aid of a telescope. The MoonWatch event is scheduled to start at the Marshall County Trail head in Glen Dale (near the old Marx Toy company) at 7:30 p.m.. The telescopes will be set up across the train tracks behind Glen Dale Park. The public is invited to bring their own telescopes to the MoonWatch.

The MoonWatch event is part of the NanoScale PlanetWalk project, funded in part by a grant from the NASA West Virginia Space Grant Consortium. The MoonWatch event is part of the International Year of Astronomy 2009 Celebration.

Thomas Harriot’s first telescopic views of the night sky and telescopically assisted drawing of the Moon, occurred over four months prior to Galileo’s telescopic observations in late 1609 and early 1610. Thomas Harriot was a true “renaissance man” making numerous original contributions to science and mathematics in early 17^th century Europe and the colonies in the Americas. For various reasons Thomas Harriot did not publish most of his discoveries and therefore is not as well known as some of the contemporary leaders in mathematics and science in the early 17^th century such as Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler.

Robert E. Strong, Director of the Near Earth Object Foundation is the coordinator for the July 26^th MoonWatch event. Imagine, says Strong, it is the summer of 1609, you just purchased a newly invented device called a “Dutch trunke” (we call it a telescope today) that makes distant objects look closer. After spending the day looking at distant treetops, neighbors down the lane and church steeples, you notice the Moon hanging in the sky. You swing the Dutch trunke at the Moon and observe lunar features never before seen by any human. Thomas Harriot sketched his historic “first ever” telescopic view of the Moon on paper on the evening of July 26^th, 1609.