Huntington Museum and Gardens

The first lunar atlases to include photographs did not include photos of the moon itself. The Englishmen James Nasmyth and James Carpenter constructed plaster models of the moon based on telescopic drawings, then photographed them for this work. The two men provided not only physical descriptions of lunar features, but also tried to describe their origins. As had many before them, they considered the craters to be of volcanic origin, a theory that was not disproved until the manned Apollo missions.