The Hatfield Lunar Atlas

the long version

<p><i>The Hatfield Lunar Atlas</i> has become an amateur lunar observer's bible since it was first published in 1968.</p><p>A major update of the atlas was made in 1998, using the same wonderful photographs that Commander Henry Hatfield made with his purpose-built 12-inch (300 mm) telescope, but bringing the lunar nomenclature up to date and changing the units from Imperial to S.I. metric.</p><p>However, with modern telescope optics, digital imaging equipment and computer enhancement new pictures can easily surpass what was achieved with Henry Hatfield's 12-inch telescope and a film camera. This limits the usefulness of the original atlas to visual observing or imaging with rather small amateur telescopes.</p><p>The new, digitally re-mastered edition vastly improves the clarity and definition of the original photographs - significantly beyond the resolution limits of the photographic grains present in earlier atlas versions - while preserving the layout and style of the original publications. This has been achieved by merging computer-visualized Earth-based views of the lunar surface, derived from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data, with scanned copies of Commander Hatfield's photographic plates, using the author's own software.</p><p>The result is a <i>The Hatfield Lunar Atlas</i> for twenty-first century amateur telescopes.</p>