Moonrise over Preston

A couple of months ago, I spotted an odd ebay auction for a "plastic moon". At first I passed over it, trying to get something else, but as I lost a couple of bids in sucession, I went back to cheer myself up, with some cheaper novelty. Looking at the listing again, it was hard to know exactly what the item was, as the list didn't go into detail and the picture was from a distance and even included the sellers fluffy slippers and pet cat. 

Curiousity got the better of me and I put in a covering bid of about a fiver and waited. A couple of days later, I won and after some back and to with the very pleasant lady selling it, arranged to collect it from Preston, rather than risk the vagaries of the royal mail.

When I met the lady selling it, at the railway station, she handed me a football sized bag and explained it had been her fathers, a space enthusiast who had wanted to call her 'Neil' after the moon explorer. She also said it originated in Hong Kong, where they had lived and dated from the seventies.

Its a delightful piece, hard blown vinyl with lots of relief detail and mapping annotations in coloured dots which seem to identify russian and american probes and landings. Overall its almost museum display quality and originally had a stand too. Im not sure how accurate the dots are, I've tried to correlate them with various lunar atlases and maps, with varying results.