Abstract
The revolution of the Moon around the Earth, and with the Earth around the Sun, are not the only motions performed by our satellites. As has been realized in the earliest days of lunar observations from the fact that the Moon exhibit to us on Earth (almost) always the same face, it must also rotate with a uniform angular velocity about an axis fixed in space and inclined but little to its orbital plane.
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Bibliographical Notes
The discovery of the existence of lunar optical librations goes back to Galileo Galilei (1932), though the correct nature of the phenomenon was not recognised till by Riccioli and Hevelius between 1638–41. Their explanation was placed on a solid mathematical footing by Newton (1687), who (in Volume 3 of his Principia) predicted also the existence of the physical librations.
The empirical foundations of the theory of the rotation of the Moon were laid down by Cassini in 1693; but almost a century had to elapse before Lagrange developed between 1764 and 1780 an adequate mathematical theory of the phenomenon, which has remained a cornerstone of all subsequent work.
Most part of the geometrical formulae developed in this section are classical. For their previous compilations cf., e.g., Graff (1901), recently made available in the English translation edited by Kopal and Mills (1965).
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© 1966 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Kopal, Z. (1966). Rotation of the Moon; Optical Librations. In: An Introduction to the Study of the Moon. Astrophysics and Space Science Library. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-6320-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-6320-2_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-017-5850-5
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