Moonlight in Darkrooms: Recording the Night Sky in the Early History of Photography

Kristen Hoving

Middlebury College

Even before the formal announcement of the invention of photography at a joint meeting of the French Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Arts in 1839, the exciting possibilities for linking photography and science were evident. A commission of the French Academy of Sciences requested Jacques Mand, Daguerre, the principal inventor of the daguerreotype process, to attempt a photograph of the moon. Although Daguerre was unsuccessful, within a year John Draper, an American professor of chemistry and physiology at New York University met the challenge by using a complicated tracking device and a combination of lenses to capture an image of the moon on a sensitized metal plate. In this paper I will discuss the history of lunar photography by examining the technical challenges and the astonishing successes of the pioneers of photography.

In particular, I will focus on the efforts of John Adams Whipple, a prominent daguerreotype portraitist in Boston, and the astronomer William Cranch Bond, director of the Harvard College Observatory. Between 1847 and 1852 Whipple and Bond used Harvard's Great Refractor telescope, the largest telescope in the world at that time, to produce images of the moon that are remarkable in their clarity of detail and aesthetic power. As director of the Observatory, Bond was responsible for demonstrating the capacities of the telescope; no better way could be had than through successful astronomical photographs. Observatory records at the Harvard Observatory chronicle the long process of trial and error that preceded their final success. Overcoming variables of weather, changing positions of the moon, and the vagaries of the governor that controlled the movement of the telescope as it tracked the night sky, as well as the technical difficulties of calculating exposure times in an era before light meters or film as we know it today, Whipple and Bond eventually produced images of the moon that took the prize for technical excellence in photography at the great Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851. They also made the first daguerreotypes of stars other than the sun (the star Vega and the double star Castor [beta-Geminorum]).

Whipple and Bond's photographs would inspire the work of Warren de la Rue, who used the wet-plate collodion process to make photographs of the moon and solar eclipses. I
will conclude by comparing Whipple and Bond's photographs of the night sky to such well-known modem masterpieces as Ansel Adams' Moonrise over Hernandez.

[This paper would not lend itself to presentation in the form of a poster. Please also note that I am submitted two paper proposals, in hopes of having one accepted.]