

This Progress Report by Gerard Kuiper indicates that construction took 2 years, and lunar photography began on October 8, 1965, less than four months after the first star tests on June 18th.The story of the 61-inch telescope is told in a number of LPL publications.The text and plates from the Consolidated Lunar Atlas are available on-line at the LPI website.The smallest features resolved are said to be in the range of about 1 km on the Moon. Naval Observatory, as well as a few taken with the Lick and Yerkes telescopes.

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Most of the plates reproduced in the CLA were taken with it, but some (especially of the Full Moon) were taken with a similar telescope operated by the U.S. The Consolidated Lunar Atlas is essentially a remake of the Photographic Lunar Atlas with photos better than those available in 1960 and might be thought of as an effort to showcase results obtained with the LPL new NASA-funded 61-inch telescope at the Catalina Station at a time when many thought space-based photography had made such observations obsolete. The Rectified Lunar Atlas was the first supplement, and the Full Moon and low sun-angle photography of the Consolidated Lunar Atlas completed the project. It is actually part of a larger work which began with Kuiper's Photographic Lunar Atlas (1960), sometimes referred to as the USAF Lunar Atlas (Civil Edition). Description The Consolidated Lunar Atlas is one of several significant Earth-based photographic atlases of the Moon compiled and published in the 1960's and 1970's.
