Gruithuisen’s Lunar City

Baron Franz von Paula Gruithuisen was a German astronomer who is responsible for, among other things, the discovery of the bright polar spots on Venus . He was also one of the first astronomers to report, based on his observations, that the moon had evidence on the surface of a civilization. In 1824 he released his paper “Entdeckung vieler deutlicher Spuren der Mondbewohner besonders eines colossalen Kunstgebäudes derselben” or (loosely translated from German) “The Discovery of significant traces from the inhabitants of the moon including a colossal building.” To my knowledge his paper has never been translated into English. I noticed the text version is translatable in Google, it’s kind of readable but obviously skewed. He observed and wrote about the "colossal building", a giant triangular feature above the crater Schroter, south of Sinus Aestuum, which he dubbed the “Lunar City.” In 1826, he went on to become a professor of astronomy at the University of Munich.

Concerning Gruithuisen’s Lunar City, Thomas Gwyn Elger writes on page 68 of “The Moon” (1895), “..that in the year 1822 Gruithuisen discovered a very remarkable formation consisting of a number of parallel rows of hills branching out (like the veins of a leaf from the midrib) from a central valley at an angle of 45º, represented by a depression between two long ridges running from north to south.” A sketch by Gruithuisen himself appears around page 116 in “Entdeckung vieler deutlicher Spuren der Mondbewohner besonders eines colossalen Kunstgebäudes derselben”

The huge feature is visible in plate D-14 of The Low-Oblique Photography section of The Consolodated Lunar Atlas (sample below).



The bottom section of Gruithuisen’s Lunar City can be seen as bright terrain in LO4-109-H1 (below), but sadly there is not much there, the image quality in that section is poor and the feature is mostly cut off.



NASA/USGS Original

The very northern section of Gruithuisen's Lunar City also appears in LO4-109-H2, although the exposure quality is similar to LO4-109-H1.



NASA/USGS Original