When (and by whom) places are named

I ran across a problem the other day, by making what seemed to be a simple assumption. I put my character in "what would one day be known as Shackleton Crater." (It is a crater on the Moon of some interest in that its rim encircles the Moon's south pole and because it's in perpetual shadow, may contain water ice. However interesting that is, it is unimportant to my story.) That wouldn't be much of a problem, except that I have him there at a certain date (between 1961 and 1969). It occured to me that the crater may have received its name prior to 1961.

So I went to look it up.

I typed in my query in myriad ways (in several search engines), followed link after link, (until they started referencing themselves). I found all sorts of references to Shackleton (the explorer) and to Shackleton Crater (named for the explorer), but absolutely nothing at all about when the crater was so named, nor who did it. Believe me, I am really tired of Google and Bing.

Any clue to how I might find out what I seek is much appreciated.

Fenika said:

Call Mr. Shackleton?

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Know a medium? Ernest Shackleton, the British explorer for whom the crater in question is named, died in 1922.

Puma said:

Try looking it up as Shackleton (without the 's). From the couple articles I saw, it looks like it might have been discovered (and named) about 1999. Apparently it is common to name places for explorers - even if they weren't involved in the discovery. Puma

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Do you have a link to these articles? As I mentioned, I looked at around 30 articles and didn't see that. Admitedly, I was looking pretty rapidly. Maybe I missed it.

BillPatt said:

I'm too tired to search within the IAU, but maybe they will respond to emails about your question.

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Good idea, Bill. But like you, I'm too tired to look there too--at the moment, anyway. (The thought of trying to suss out all that French is daunting. NASA is bad enough.)

If that 1999 date (mentioned by Puma above) is right, then I'm good. I really don't need to know who did the naming, although that would be, I think, interesting. I just need to know when the naming happened. It seems odd to me that sort of information isn't readily available. We know who named America (Martin Waldseemüller), after whom (the explorer Amerigo Vespucci) and approximately when (on a map he drew in 1507). We know who named the Columbia River (Capt. Robert Gray), for whom (his ship the Columbia Rediviva), and exactly when (May 18, 1792--he kept good records).[The references here are taken directly from Wikipedia.]

So if the information as to who suggested the name of Shackleton Crater (or for that matter ANY other Lunar feature--the same problem exists for all of them, apparently), who gets credit for it, and when is something the IAU keeps track of, why isn't it as readily available? Hell, if I had named a crater for my cat, I would want everyone to know. Yes, that'd be all of you here in AW, too. heh heh heh

Thanks to you all for weighing in. I won't give up, just yet.

ETA: See? Perserverance pays off. Bill, you were right. The information (albeit sketchy) is indeed in the IAU site. The method of digging it out is just not very intuitive. But I wrestled it out, sweat, tears and all. Doesn't say who proposed the name, but it does reveal that the name was approved in 1994.

Thanks again to all.