Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli and the Planets

Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli will be forever associated with the illusory network of martian canals and the captured rotation period of Mercury, about which there already exists an enormous amount of literature. But although Schiaparelli will always receive some blame for the long drawn out debate associated with the elusive, streaky martian features, he was also the first to achieve high positional accuracy in planetary mapping, and whatever stylistic drawbacks his Mars maps possess, they were based upon accurately placed details. He too was the first to compile an albedo map for Mercury.