Ferret Williams

This comic was a day late because(in addition to time management issues) I searched all over the moon for the perfect place to use here, in addition to all over Mars for any similar-sounding location that could cause confusion(my original intent). It was a fascinating excursion.

Wiener Crater is 120 kilometers across(74.5 miles), and according to Wikipedia, Pawsey Crater “is partly overlain by the ejecta from the younger Wiener impact”. That makes it sound dirtier, heh. The information from Wikipedia matches up with what I saw on Google Earth(where I discovered it). Both are on the far side of the moon, so unfortunately you can’t see the moon’s Weiner Crater from your bedroom telescope.

As for the term “lunar geography”, that also gave me some extra research. I wanted to be sure I was using the correct lunar variation of geography, but since “geo” means “earth”, I KNEW it couldn’t be called “lunar geography”. Or so I thought. The only variation worth considering was “lunography”, which 2 watchers had suggested as well, but a Google search came up with 1,530 results for that while it found about 6,470,000 results for “lunar geography”. In addition, my spell checker was underlining it and Google thought I might be looking for something else. But… this is SURELY the correct term! The thing that got me to finally settle on the term “lunar geography” was the fact that NASA uses the term. NASA! There weren’t even any search results on their website for lunography. NASA also gave a list of reasons why “lunar geography” is correct on this page, with the following detail finally making me change my mind: the Greek word can also refer to “land” or “ground”. That makes sense, since we do call dirt “earth”. That justifies the term enough(barely), and the fact that we don’t have to use different variations for every single rock in space gives a good reason to actually use it. I’m fine with lunography, but Joviography for Jupiter(59 results)? How many people would know I’m talking about Mars when I say “Areography”(27,600 results?!)? What’s the geography variation for Venus? With this in mind, I’ll go ahead and settle with “geography” applying to any planet. Oh… and apparently the actual lunar variation of geography is instead “selenography”(62,200 results). What??? I’ve never heard of the Greek diety Selene. Yeah, I’m all for simplifying the term so people actually know what I’m talking about.