The First Surviving Photograph of the Moon (1840)

Every­one has been agog over the first pho­tos from the James Webb tele­scope, and for good rea­son. “These images,” Riv­ka Galchin writes at The New York­er, “car­ry news about the ear­ly uni­verse, the birth and death of stars, the col­li­sion of galax­ies, and the atmos­phere of exo­plan­ets.” They’re also “very, very pret­ty,” she writes, com­par­ing them to Ver­meer.

The clar­i­ty and lev­els of detailed infor­ma­tion about the ear­li­est galax­ies have even aston­ished astronomers, whose work has advanced rapid­ly along­side the growth of the pho­to­graph­ic medi­um. It was an astronomer, in fact – Johann Hein­rich von Madler – who first coined the word “pho­tog­ra­phy” in 1839. “Astronomers quick­ly embraced the use of pho­to­graph­ic plates because of their good res­o­lu­tion and the abil­i­ty to make much larg­er images,” APS Physics News notes.

Astropho­tog­ra­phy prop­er­ly began in 1840, when John William Drap­er, a British-born chemist and doc­tor, took the image above from the roof of the New York Uni­ver­si­ty obser­va­to­ry, cred­it­ed as the first daguerreo­type of the Moon. Daguerre him­self might have tak­en an 1839 image, but it was like­ly destroyed in a fire, as were Draper’s attempts of the pre­vi­ous year, which burned up in a NYU blaze in 1865.

By all accounts, how­ev­er, these ear­li­er attempts at Moon pho­tog­ra­phy were blur­ry and unfo­cused, show­ing lit­tle detail of the Earth’s satel­lite. Draper’s lunar “por­trait,” from 1840, at the top, is large­ly con­sid­ered “the world’s first true astropho­to,” writes Jason Major at Lights in the Dark, for its lev­els of detail and high con­trast, com­par­a­tive­ly speak­ing. As Scott Walk­er writes:

Drap­er set out to try and improve on Daguerre’s break­through by increas­ing plate sen­si­tiv­i­ty and reduc­ing expo­sure times.… His advance­ment in the tech­nique allowed visu­al­iza­tion of craters, moun­tains and val­leys on the moon’s sur­face which pre­vi­ous­ly couldn’t be cap­tured.

Splotched, spot­ted, and heav­i­ly degrad­ed, the image may not look like much now, but a con­tem­po­rary of Drap­er described it then as “the first time that any­thing like a dis­tinct rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the moon’s sur­face has been obtained.”

The achieve­ment was inspi­ra­tional, and many bet­ter attempts soon fol­lowed in rapid suc­ces­sion as the medi­um evolved. In 1851, pho­tog­ra­ph­er John Whip­ple and father-and-son astronomers William and George Bond improved on Drap­er’s process and made the Moon daguerreo­type fur­ther up through the Great Refrac­tor Equa­to­r­i­al Mount Tele­scope at the Har­vard Col­lege Obser­va­to­ry. (The year pre­vi­ous, Drap­er him­self col­lab­o­rat­ed with Bond père to make an image of the star Vega). The image caused a “ver­i­ta­ble furor,” Smart His­to­ry notes, at the Great Exhi­bi­tion of 1851.

Between 1857 and 1862, astropho­tog­ra­ph­er and ama­teur astronomer War­ren De La Rue made a series of stereo­scop­ic Moon images (lov­ing­ly pre­served online by astro­physi­cist and Queen gui­tarist Bri­an May), one of which you can see fur­ther up. De La Rue had seen Whip­ple’s daguerreo­type at the Great Exhi­bi­tion and began inno­vat­ing his own process for cre­at­ing stereo­scop­ic astropho­tographs. At the same time, Drap­er’s son, Hen­ry, “an accom­plished astropho­tog­ra­ph­er and one of the most famous Amer­i­can astronomers of his day,” Kiona Smith writes at Forbes, had tak­en over his father’s Moon pho­tog­ra­phy project. See an 1863 image tak­en by the younger Drap­er just above.

“Before the inven­tion of pho­tog­ra­phy,” notes APS News, “astronomers had to sketch what they saw in their tele­scopes by hand, often miss­ing cru­cial details.” Daguerre and Drap­er’s inno­va­tions, and those that came soon after­ward, “showed them a far supe­ri­or method was pos­si­ble.” It is aston­ish­ing that these results could be achieved only a few decades after the first pho­to­graph, tak­en in 1826 by Nicéphore Niépce. It is maybe even more aston­ish­ing that only a cen­tu­ry and a half  or so lat­er — a mean­ing­less drop in the cos­mic timescale — astropho­tog­ra­phy would look beyond the moon to the very ori­gins of the uni­verse itself.

via Smart His­to­ry

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The First Pho­to­graph Ever Tak­en (1826)

Watch the Orig­i­nal TV Cov­er­age of the His­toric Apol­lo 11 Moon Land­ing: Record­ed on July 20, 1969

The Full Rota­tion of the Moon: A Beau­ti­ful, High Res­o­lu­tion Time Lapse Film

The First Pho­tographs Tak­en by the Webb Tele­scope: See Far­away Galax­ies & Neb­u­lae in Unprece­dent­ed Detail

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness