Sky & Telescope's 15-cm Moon Globe

Reach for the Moon with a 6-inch (15-cm) model of our celestial neighbor.

The mosaic used for this globe consists of more than 15,000 images acquired by a camera aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) between November 2009 and February 2011.

To create this dramatic portrayal, the editors of Sky & Telescope worked with the LRO camera team and with specialists at the U.S. Geological Survey to produce a custom base map showing details as small as 1 mile (1½ km). Special processing has preserved the natural shading of the lunar surface while allowing the labels to stand out clearly.

The names of more than 190 craters, maria (lava plains), mountain ranges, and other features are shown, as are the landing sites for Apollo and Luna spacecraft.

The globe comes with a freestanding, clear plastic base and an information card describing key Moon facts and how the globe was made.

Object in the nighttime sky captivates us more than the Moon does. Every month we watch it evolve in its phase from new to full and back again, and through a telescope its surface features look very different depending on where the Sun is in the lunar sky. Yet the Moon’s spin and its orbit are locked together in a way that never lets us see more than about half of the Moon’s surface. With our carefully crafted 6-inch globe, easily held by hands big and small, you can explore features like dark Mare Orientale, and the bull’s-eye set of mountainous rings surrounding it, that are impossible to see from here on Earth.

Did You Know?
Six crews of Apollo astronauts returned to Earth with precious troves of rocks and dust they’d collected on the lunar surface. But those aren’t the only lunar samples available to scientists. Three robotic Soviet spacecraft landed on the Moon and returned with small but important caches of lunar material — and geologists also have access to more than 350 meteorites that were blasted off the Moon and later landed on Earth.

ISBN 13: 9781940038537