A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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selenography
Selenography is the mapping and description of the surface of the Moon: its seas, craters, mountains, rilles, and the naming of them. It began as soon as there were telescopes and it produced maps of remarkable accuracy for two centuries before anyone could check them from any other angle. The far side was unmapped until 1959 and is a different world, with almost no dark plains.
Etymology
The word is built on Selene, the Greek goddess of the Moon, and the Greek for writing or describing, on exactly the same pattern as geography. The element selenium is named from the same source, chosen by its discoverer because it kept turning up alongside tellurium, which is named for the earth.
Notes
The naming conventions come almost entirely from a single book, Giovanni Riccioli’s 1651 map, which gave the seas their weather and mood names and named the craters after astronomers and philosophers. Riccioli disagreed with Copernicus and put him in a crater anyway, which is generally read as a piece of quiet dissent from a Jesuit who could not say so directly.