This is correct. But the belief in Aristotle's philosophy was even more powerful: "The medieval followers of Aristotle, first in the Islamic world and then in

This is correct. But the belief in Aristotle's philosophy was even more powerful: "The medieval followers of Aristotle, first in the Islamic world and then in Christian Europe, tried to make sense of the lunar spots in Aristotelian terms. Various possibilities were entertained. It had been suggested already in Antiquity that the Moon was a perfect mirror and that its markings were reflections of earthly features, but this explanation was easily dismissed because the face of the Moon never changes as it moves about the Earth. Perhaps there were vapors between the Sun and the Moon, so that the images were actually contained in the Sun's incident light and thus reflected to the Earth. The explanation that finally became standard was that there were variations of "density" in the Moon that caused this otherwise perfectly spherical body to appear the way it does. The perfection of the Moon, and therefore the heavens, was thus preserved." http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/observations/moon.html http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/observations/moon.html