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See Moon (mythology).
By the medieval period, before the invention of the telescope, some believed that the Moon was a "perfectly smooth" sphere.
In 1609, Galileo Galilei drew one of the first telescopic drawings of the Moon in his book Sidereus Nuncius and noted that it was not smooth but had craters. Later in the 17th century, Giovanni Battista Riccioli and Francesco Maria Grimaldi drew a map of the Moon and gave many craters the names they still have today.
On maps, the dark parts of the Moon's surface were called maria (singular mare) or "seas", and the light parts were called terrae or continents. The possibility that the Moon could contain vegetation and be inhabited by "selenites" was seriously considered by some major astronomers even into the first decades of the 19th century.
In 1835, the Great Moon Hoax fooled some people into thinking that there were exotic animals living on the Moon. Almost at the same time however (during 1834– 1836), Wilhelm Beer and Johann Heinrich Mädler were publishing their four-volume Mappa Selenographica and the book Der Mond in 1837, which firmly established the conclusion that the Moon has no bodies of water nor any appreciable atmosphere.
There remained some controversy over whether features on the Moon could undergo changes. Some observers claimed that some small craters had appeared or disappeared, but in the 20th century it was determined that these claims were illusory, due to observing under different lighting conditions or due to the inadequacy of earlier drawings. It is however known that the phenomenon of outgassing occasionally occurs.
During the Nazi era in Germany, the Welteislehre theory, which claimed the moon was made of solid ice, was promoted by Nazi leaders.
The far side of the Moon remained completely unknown until the Luna 3 probe in 1959, and was extensively mapped by the Lunar Orbiter program in the 1960s.
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