LUNAR GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY DESIGNATES “PEACE CRATER” TO HONOR JOHN LENNON
New York USA (9 October 2009 LT) — The International Lunar Geographic Society has announced that a crater on Luna, Earth’s Moon, has been renamed to honor musician and peace activist John Lennon.
The crater, which is located in the Moon’s Lacus Somniorum (“Lake of Dreams”) district, has been given the honorary designation as the John Lennon Peace Crater on the occasion of the 69th anniversary of Mr. Lennon’s birth.
Forty years ago, in March 1969, Mr. Lennon and his wife, the artist Yoko Ono, staged their first “Bed-In For Peace” in Amsterdam. The event was followed in June of the same year by a second “Bed-In” in Montréal, during which Mr. Lennon composed and recorded the anthem “Give Peace A Chance.”
It is estimated that a quarter-million protesters sang the chorus from “Give Peace A Chance” at the first Vietnam Moratorium Day, held on 15 October 1969. Since then, the song has been adopted by anti-war activists around the world.
Mr. Lennon, whose colorful and often controversial life was cut short in 1980, left a lasting legacy as an activist against war, bigotry, sexism and other forms of injustice.
As a musician and founder of The Beatles, in partnership with Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, Mr. Lennon was one of the most successful and influential artists in the history of entertainment. He was inducted, posthumously, into the Songwriters Hall of Fame (1987) and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (in 1988 as a member of The Beatles, and in 1994 as a solo artist), and received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1991).
The crater designated to honor John Lennon was previously known as Daniell D, and is located at 37.0o North (latitude) and 25.8o East (longitude) on the so-called Earthside of the Moon. It measures approximately six kilometers in diameter, with a depth of about 990 meters.
The John Lennon Peace Crater is part of the Daniell crater group, named for John Frederic Daniell (1790-1845), a London-born physicist, meteorologist and professor of chemistry. It is the largest of three satellite craters to Daniell, and rests in the heart of the Moon’s magnificent Lake of Dreams.
The official designation of a Lunar crater is a singular honor bestowed upon only a select few luminaries. Among those receiving this rare tribute over the past century are Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Columbus, Sir Isaac Newton, Julius Caesar and Jules Verne.
The International Lunar Geographic Society, previously known as the Lunar Republic Society, is the world’s largest and most prominent group advocating privatized exploration, settlement and development of Earth’s Moon. The centerpiece of the Society’s effort is a ten- year, $3.8-billion (USD) program to return humans to the Moon and establish permanent bases there.
The Society has also developed the most successful commercially-available lunar photomap software ever released to the public, the Full Moon Atlas (http://www.fullmoonatlas.com), which is used by astronomers and in classrooms around the world.
The Society successfully advocated the removal of a crater named for an accused Nazi war criminal, Dr. Hans Eppinger, Jr., by the International Astronomical Union, and is the prime mover behind the draft proposal to designate a group of Lunar craters as a memorial to the seven crew members who perished in the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-107) tragedy. (See http://lunargeographic.com/columbia_region.shtml)
The Lunar Geographic Society is a registered International Business Company (IBC #519589) currently authorized to operate in more than 200 nations around the world, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, France, China, Japan and India, as well as all other nations in Europe, Asia and the Americas.
The Society’s main operations hubs are in Hong Kong and on the Isle of Man (U.K.). It maintains a satellite office in Manhattan for business operations in the Americas.
JOHN LENNON PEACE CRATER INFORMATION
Eponym: John (Winston) Ono Lennon (Daniell D) Location: Central Lacus Somniorum (37.0° N 25.8° E) Approximate Crater Diameter: ~6.0 kilometers Crater Depth: ~990 meters
The International Lunar Geographic Society
Administrative Section — New York City
The designation of the John Lennon Peace Crater, located in the Moon’s Lacus Somniorum (Lake Of Dreams), becomes effective on 9 October 2009, which would have been John’s 69th birthday.
One bit of information that was left out of the press release is that the crater may be viewed from Earth using any conventional consumer-grade telescope.
Lacus Somniorum is a plain located in the northeastern part of the Moon‘s near side. It is located at selenographic coordinates 38.0° N, 29.2° E, and has a diameter of 384 kilometers. (It is the largest of the lunar features designated Lacus.) The name is Latin for Lake of Dreams, a title given to this feature by Riccioli.
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