The Far Side of the Moon

This stunning book is a companion for Byrnes award-winning Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Near Side of the Moon [Springer, 2005]. It provides the most detailed and beautiful coverage to date of the far side of the Moon. Because the far side is permanently turned away from the Earth and cannot be viewed by Earth-based astronomers, this book is not organized as an atlas but instead as a complete photographic survey. As in Byrnes previous volume, the author has taken the original images of the far side of the Moon and cleaned them of system artefacts using modern digital image processing. This is the first book to explain why the far side of the Moon looks so different from the near side, and it describes the newly discovered near side megabasin.

Charlie Byrne worked as a systems engineer at Bellcomm, for support of the Lunar Orbiter project. He is currently carrying out research about the Moon, and was the discoverer of the gigantic "near side megabasin" that covers nearly all of the near side of the Moon and whose ejecta has established the shape of the far side of the Moon.