During the full moon in space, you can clearly see without auxiliary devices that on the surface of the moon there are many different spots, which one resemble the image of several people, and the other - a bunny. These spots began to be called the seas of the moon at the beginning of the XVII century. Astronomers of those times assumed that there was water on the earth’s satellite, and, consequently, seas and oceans.
D. Riccioli - The Italian astronomer gave names to these seas and oceans, which are used today. These names reflected the influence of the moon on climatic changes occurring on the surface of the earth. It turned out that all these judgments were fundamentally wrong. It is worth noting the “Sea of Crises”, the name of which meant weather changes, and not the economic decline of the state. As for the bright areas on the disk of the moon, it was assumed that there is land.
Astronomer R. Boshkovich in the middle of the XVIII century proved the theory of the absence of atmosphere on the moon. When a satellite covers a star, it almost instantly disappears, but if there was an atmosphere, the star would disappear gradually. Thus, it was proved that there can be no water on the Moon, because in the absence of atmospheric pressure, it would simply evaporate over a certain period of time.
Galileo Galilei established the fact that the moon is covered by mountains, among which whole ranges were clearly visible. Astronomers decided to give them names similar to those on Earth (Carpathians, Alps, etc.). However, on the surface of the Earth’s satellite there were noticed special mountains with a ring shape - craters, which in Greek means “bowl”.
D. Riccioli proposed calling these craters the names of famous scientists who were fond of astronomy. So there was a crater Plato, Ptolemy, Galileo, Riccioli and many others. Along with the names of such great people there are those that even Google will not find: Theophilus, Autolycus, although these people were quite famous astronomers at one time. After the death of Riccioli, the craters continued to be given the names: Delander, Piazzi and even Darwin (not to be confused with Charles Darwin).
When the Soviet Union began to seriously study the moon, it was decided to build interplanetary stations, with which they could shoot the back of the moon. Thus, the names of Soviet astronomers, astronauts and other scientists appeared on the maps of the Earth’s satellite: Gagarin, Mendeleev, Chebyshev, Lomonosov, Numerov and many others.