Planning our lunar return? Get a telescope

Perhaps you’re a propulsion engineer making lunar landers as part of NASA’s CLPS program. Perhaps you’re a lawyer specializing in the OST. Or you are a chemist cracking the codes of lunar ISRU. 

If you are any of these things or even if you just know what those acronyms mean, you’re part of the lunar revival, our return to the dramatic wilds of the moon, a return for science and industry and, just maybe, helping to make life multi-planetary.

I absolutely support those goals, but I also have a telescope. Anyone planning our lunar future should have one too or, at least, regular access to one. Why? Because we won’t have a lunar future worth having if we don’t really see the moon. And if we don’t really see the moon, we’ll miss how its beauty can guide us when we return.

I thought about that one recent pre-dawn morning, huddled over my 10-inch telescope with a cup of coffee and a view of the moon. Puffy jacket on, ducks chortling in the nearby canal that runs through our neighborhood, I magnified the badlands between Lacus Mortis and the twin complex craters Aristoteles and Eudoxus. This rough region fairly glittered with sun-tipped terrain as I looked from the bottom of a twitchy atmosphere. Then I stared for a long time at the gloomy majesty of the Arago volcanic domes as lunar sunset loomed at the terminator, the sharp divide between day and night on the moon, low wrinkle ridges to the east like subtle reminders. And I flew above the heavily impacted Southern Highlands, my eye heading toward the south polar limb.

That’s where we’re going. To the permanently shadowed regions that harbor water ice.

For several years, while working on a book about the moon, I used my telescope, a map and some atlases, not to just glance at craters but to explore and learn the lunar surface. I fell quickly in love with that austere and sublime landscape, at once alien and somehow akin to parts of the American West. In fact, science writer Walter Sullivan once compared the famous Lunar Orbiter oblique view of Copernicus crater to western front of the Wasatch. That’s my mountain range here in Utah.

I have looked at the moon from backyards and deserts and canyons in Arizona and Utah. Now I can find my way around without maps. I love seeking out tiny details — like that hard-to-see volcano in Petavius — and I understand the physical manifestations of the moon’s geology. Such views brought me to a journey with that world’s importance to global cultures, the birth of modern science, dreams of lunar life (alas, dashed) and even the positive neurochemistry of awe. I once made a pilgrimage to Mt. Wilson’s historic 60-inch reflector to see the moon in shocking hugeness.

I don’t expect most people — even lunar scientists who know the moon’s cosmochemistry but who couldn’t find the dark sheen of Endymion if their lives depended on it — to go as deep as I have.

You don’t have to. Just looking at the moon provokes one into quiet, personal exploration. Beyond what can become a numbing profusion of holes (there are a lot of craters!) lunar looking and just a bit of knowledge becomes a way of seeking wilderness and cosmic context from one’s own comfort. It’s a sweet and instructive paradox to travel to an airless world while breathing in a cold, autumn morning. 

It’s one thing to know the moon from spreadsheets, diagrams, PowerPoints and white papers. It’s another thing to experience it as though you yourself are in close orbit. Yet another to do so with some historical depth. We’ve done a lot of damage to Earthly places by abstracting them — by not seeing or knowing them as literal places. Applied from a distance, what could be well-crafted exploration and use often becomes blunt force.

The great 20^th century conservationist Aldo Leopold once wrote, “We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” That same applies to the moon, as astronomer Jessica Heim and others are arguing in their research and papers. Leopold isn’t saying the land is beyond use. He’s suggesting that a sensory and intellectual relationship to it — in this case, the moon — lays the necessary foundation for careful and caring use.

I want us to return to the moon, this time to stay. To sustainably utilize its gifts of water ice to craft a vibrant lunar community and to help us explore the rest of the solar system. To spread, where appropriate, the electrical net of a radio telescope to probe the origins of the universe. To study the moon’s composition to help us understand its formation and its role in the early solar system. To look deep and to look far.

I’d like to think that our lunar return will help us forge an aspiration, even if impossible, to try to solve problems without creating new ones. Or, at least, build scientific and industrial infrastructure that isn’t ugly. That would be a start. Perhaps we’ll agree to bury waste instead of dumping it in the open. Perhaps we’ll even agree to leave swaths of the moon alone because not every patch of moondust needs a bootprint. Perhaps we’ll commit to treating each other with more dignity than we do now, given the anonymity and rapid-fire reactivity of our 24/7 online world.

And rather than consider these questions from abstractions, why not take a few minutes each month and magnify the very real moon through the eyepiece of a decent telescope? The views may be choppy. They won’t be high-def like the astounding Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photos. Clouds will interfere. Texts will ping, demanding attention. Our lives are not designed for this kind of quiet or reflection. But, if for nothing other than well-being, we can carve it out. And if you don’t have a telescope, hundreds of public libraries have them to lend. Who knows, maybe, like me, you’ll work through a lunar-observing program like the ones offered by the Astronomical League, a way to meld exploration with personal growth and a sense of balance. That sense of wonder so many of us find in science fiction, it’s above us every month.

Places don’t care. But places deserve care. Places deserve care because we deserve care. The moon’s beauty is as much a resource as water ice. 

Not long ago, I noticed a crater, Lilius, that I’d never paid attention to before. Lilius is worn down but fresh enough that it sports a central peak. Most of the crater was in the cave-dark lunar night. But the mountain top was sun-lit. I imagined standing there, seeing the strong curve of the horizon, then following down a marked trail, helmet lights switched on, to one of a handful of pressurized huts the Lunar Tourist Authority allows, marveling that the thousands and thousands of square miles we’d left alone were testament to the fact that we’d arrived and that, because we want things to last, we were practicing temperance.

Christopher Cokinos is the author of “Still as Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon from Antiquity to Tomorrow.” His account of an all-artists lunar surface analog mission at Biosphere 2 was published at Esquire. His feature on fighting light pollution was the July cover story for Astronomy magazine.

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