Lunar Heritage Area
While time travel into the future is impossible for wizards except in the most unusual circumstances, occasional scraps of news do drift backwards against the prevailing direction of the Arrow of Time courtesy of the Powers That Be. Existing as They do outside or beyond time, the Powers are able to slip into and out of our physical universe in the same way human beings might walk into and then out of a room, observing past, present or future without having to submit Themselves to the tyranny of the local timeflow. It’s by virtue of such paratemporal insertions that Earth’s wizards have been made privy to a limited amount of information about the future of the Moon.
Word has come back from a little further along Earth’s most likely timelines that in the course of the century to come, a hotel complex, interpretive history center, and various other tourist amenities will almost certainly be built near the site of the first lunar landing at Mare Tranquillitatis. With this in mind, wizards — who frequently use the Moon as staging area, playground, and retreat — have informally devoted themselves to keeping the area free of any changes which would upset the scientists and explorers of the later 21st century.
The area in the Sea of Tranquillity which is of most interest in this regard, a circle two hundred fifty kilometers in diameter centered on Statio Tranquillitatis / Tranquillity Base, has been designated as the Lunar Heritage Area. Wizards who walk there are required to remove any trace of their own footprints (skywalking is thought to be a preferable form of transport in such an archaeologically fragile environment) and under no circumstances to disturb the footprints or other artifacts that are already there. (Some wizards, feeling strongly about one aspect or another of the remnants, have had to be reminded not to stand up the blown-over American flag at the Tranquillity Base site, and not to mess with the one-of-a-kind, abandoned Hasselblad camera.) The same cautions extend to all other landing sites, but because of the level of attention that the eventual construction projects will bring to bear on the Base area when Tranquillity Center is built, special care is being taken there to keep everything “as is”.
Naturally wizards go to other parts of the Moon, and when visiting such places, there’s a general agreement that it would be irresponsible to leave cultural artifacts around where anyone will ever find them. “Pack out your trash” is always the rule. But some wizards do bend the intent of the rules…probably, in some cases, a little further than they should. For example, Kit has been taken to task once or twice for some casual Lunar rock-carving which will seriously yank the chains of future conspiracy theorists if it’s not put right before it’s found. Fortunately, there are automated Manual functions that keep an ongoing log of all lunar visits, and an informal “clean-up team” checks up on visited sites and conducts occasional tidying runs.
The features marking the inner boundaries of the Lunar Heritage Area (progressing clockwise from the “twelve o’clock” point of the circle) are: Jansen, Dorsa Barlow (15.0° N, 31.0° E), Mons Esam (14° 36′ N / 35° 42′ E), Lawrence, Da Vinci, Aryabhata, Maskelyne (topmost and bottommost images), Rima Maskelyne, Lamont, Arago, Rimae Sosigenes, and Ross (top right image, at image’s bottom). (SYWTBAW, DW, HW, WAW, UL)
See also: Cone of Silence: Harmon, Robert Anson: Jura Base: Lunar Carpathians: Tycho Dome.
(An additional online reference, invaluable for wizards and astronomers alike, is the Clementine lunar image browser. Derived from it is the direct-access dropdown feature selector by which the above features can be imaged.)