A sixth-grade project by Peter Schultz ’66—a moon made of clay, its surface contoured by flathead and finishing nails—predicted his future career, but not the one he assumed at the time, that of an artist, like his mom. “I didn’t know it then, but I was depicting the difference between simple and complex craters.” An astronomy major at Carleton, Schultz went on to work on NASA’s Deep Impact team and teach geological sciences at Brown. All along the way, art—or more precisely, visualization—was at the core of his work. “I was always curious why I could see things that other people couldn’t. And I’m convinced it’s because of the art training.”
Schultz and his wife, an artist, recently gifted Carleton 77 books that reflect their twin passions. The oldest object in the Peter H. and Barbara W. Schultz Visualizing the Moon Collection is Johannes Hevelius’s 1647 Selenographia (pictured), the first detailed lunar atlas, while the newest is 1976’s Moon Morphology, the published version of Schultz’s PhD thesis, containing photographs from NASA’s Lunar Orbiter missions. While most are scientific, some consider the moon’s place in the popular imagination, like The Moon Hoax, which reported the discovery—believable to some readers in 1835—that humans and animals coexisted on the moon.
Special Collections Librarian Jackie Beckey says she’s most excited about the collection’s possibilities in the classroom: “One of the most incredible parts is how it bridges the humanities and STEM. It’s so interdisciplinary—a dream come true for a liberal arts campus library, where we want to percolate all kinds of ideas.”