Who discovered the Moon?

The Moon has no discoverer because it was never hidden. It is the brightest object in the sky after the Sun, changes appearance every night, and marks the cycles that have governed calendars, planting, and tides since long before writing existed. Any attribution to a specific person is therefore false: prehistoric peoples already observed it closely enough to count its phases. What does have an author, a date, and a document is the moment the Moon stopped being a disk and became a place.

Galileo Galilei pointed his telescope at the satellite in late November 1609 and drew what he saw. He was neither the only one nor necessarily the first to look at the Moon through a spyglass, but he was the first astronomer to publish lunar drawings made from telescopic observations: they appeared in Sidereus nuncius, the short book he printed in 1610, with copper engravings of the Moon in four different phases. What those plates showed was devastating for the physics of his time: mountains, valleys, and craters, a rough and uneven surface instead of the perfect, unchanging sphere demanded by Aristotelian cosmology.

Selenography was born from this and advanced quickly. Johannes Hevelius began observing in 1643 and published his work in 1647; Robert Hooke published his own lunar observations in 1665; and in 1679 Giovanni Cassini presented the first proper map of the Moon. Over the course of the 17th century, the satellite went from being a symbol to being a territory with named features and coordinates, the same framework that, three centuries later, made it possible to choose a specific spot in the Sea of Tranquility to land a lunar module.