Nicolaus Copernicus of his life. At the instance of Roger Boscovich, the Catholic Church's 1758 "Index of Prohibited Books" omitted the general prohibition of works defending heliocentrism, but retained the specific prohibitions of the original uncensored versions of "De revolutionibus" and Galileo's "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems". Those prohibitions were finally dropped from the 1835 "Index". There has been discussion of Copernicus' nationality and of whether it is meaningful to ascribe to him a nationality in the modern sense. Nicolaus Copernicus was born and raised in Royal Prussia, a semiautonomous and polyglot region of the Kingdom of Poland. He was
Copernicus (lunar crater) formation. Copernicus itself was a possible landing site for the canceled Apollo 20 mission. Copernicus is named after the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. Like many of the craters on the Moon's near side, it was given its name by Giovanni Riccioli, whose 1651 nomenclature system has become standardized. Riccioli awarded Copernicus a prominent crater despite the fact that, as an Italian Jesuit, he conformed with church doctrine in publicly opposing Copernicus's heliocentric system. Riccioli justified the name by noting that he had symbolically thrown all the heliocentrist astronomers into the Ocean of Storms. However, astronomical historian Ewan Whitaker suspects that the