Witelo

Witelo (also Erazmus Ciolek Witelo; Witelon; Vitellio; Vitello; Vitello Thuringopolonis; Vitulon; Erazm Ciołek; born ca. 1230, probably in Legnica in Lower Silesia; died after 1280, before 1314) was a friar, theologian and scientist: a physicist, natural philosopher, mathematician. He is an important figure in the history of philosophy in Poland. On the Moon there is a crater, Vitello, named after him.

Life

Witelo's mother was from a Polish knightly house, while his father was a German settler from Thuringia. He called himself, in Latin, "Thuringorum et Polonorum filius" — "a son of Thuringians and Poles." He studied at Padua University about 1260, then went on to Viterbo. He became friends with William of Moerbeke, the translator of Aristotle. Witelo's major surviving work on optics, Perspectiva, completed in about 1270–78, was dedicated to William. In 1284 he described reflection and refraction of light.

Perspectiva

Witelo's Perspectiva was largely based on the work of the Persian polymath Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham; d. ca. 1041) and in turn powerfully influenced later scientists, in particular Johannes Kepler. Witelo's treatise in optics was closely linked to the Latin version of Ibn al-Haytham's Arabic opus: Kitab al-manazir (The Book of Optics; De aspectibus or Perspectivae), and both were printed in the Friedrich Risner edition Opticae Thesaurus (Basel, 1572).

Vitello (crater)

Vitello is a lunar crater that lies along the southern edge of the small Mare Humorum, in the southwest part of the Moon's near side. It lies just to the east of the lava-flooded crater Lee. To the northeast along the edge of the lunar mare is the Rupes Kelvin, an irregular fault line.

This crater has a low, roughly circular rim with a sharp edge. The interior floor is irregular, rugged and hilly, with a smaller, concentric crater offset to the east of the midpoint. A low ridge projects out from the northwest rim into the mare.

Vitello was once believed to be a caldera rather than an impact crater. In To A Rocky Moon, lunar geologist Don E. Wilhelms summarized: It "is a Saari-Shorthill infrared hotspot, is fractured, and is blanketed and surrounded by a dark deposit. If there is a caldera on the moon, this ought to be it." However, Lunar Orbiter 5 acquired high-resolution images of the interior and geologists noted that the fractures were filled with boulders which caused the infrared anomaly, and so volcanic heat was not escaping from Vitello. Wilhelms concluded "...if it is a caldera, its activity expired long ago."