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Lunar Nomenclature

This page is http://www.planet4589.org/astro/lunar

Here I present (as of the original writing in 2004) the most complete public digital list of named lunar features. I have created a digital version of the list of lunar craters in the NASA Catalog of Lunar Nomenclature (NASA-RP-1097, Andersson and Whitaker 1982, hereafter AW82). Most of the data herein is now included in Jenny Blue's official [usgs.gov]list.

• <Craters.AW82> contains name, latitude, longitude and diameter in km for each crater listed in the first table of AW82. There may be some typos; please let me know if you find any discrepancies between this list and AW82.
• is a merge of the AW82 list with the list on the USGS site http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/. Since the publication of AW82 there have been a number of changes to lunar nomenclature and this merge brings the data up to date circa 2007.
  The file contains name, latitude, longitude, diameter, feature type, citation for first description (incomplete), citation for first use of nomenclature (incomplete). It uses the same convention as the USGS for diacritical marks (e.g. |: for umlaut).
  In the 2023 revision, an additional column has been added with the unicode versions of the crater names.
• describes in detail the choices I made in this merging process.
• is in the same format as Craters and contains the list of all non-crater named features, derived from the USGS list.
• <Craters.kml> is a KML file containing the positions of everything in both the Craters and Features lists, suitable for loading into Google Moon.
• lists correspondences between old and new names.
• gives a key to the nomenclature citations used in the Craters and Features files.

Thanks to Chuck Wood, Jenny Blue, Alan Baxter and Jim Mosher for comments and corrections.

Jonathan McDowell, 2004 Mar 8. (Some typos corrected 2005 Apr and updates added 2006 Oct; some duplicates removed and the Crossids file improved on 2007 Mar 30 and Jul 15).