Darryl Bennett, age 12, of Jamesburg, New Jersey, for his question:

What is selenography?

This word was introduced to the general public with the story of the Lunar astronauts. For this reason one might suppose that selenography is a newly coined term of the space age. Actually it is a very old word, dating back to the astronomers who first tried to figure out what the shadowy patches were on the face of the moon. The first part of the word selenography is taken from an older name for the moon. The second part which appears, for example, in the word geography, means a written record or diagram.

Geography is the study of the features on the surface of the earth. Selenography is the study of the physical features on the surface of the moon. It dates back to the time when astronomers thought that certain areas of the moon were seas. Its modern version includes all the detailed photographs we now have of the lunar surface, plus first hand data gathered by our Lunar astronauts