First useful astronomical photo:-
The first useful astronomical photo was of a total solar eclipse, taken by William de La Rue in 1860. He used a Kew photoheliograph to capture the precious shots of totality. It answered the hotly debated question at that time - where do the flares around the "diamond ring" in a totality originate from? (Earth's atmosphere, Moon, or the Sun)
Setting sail in the borrowed Royal Navy troopship HMS Himalaya, the chemist, astronomer and gentleman-adventurer Warren de La Rue (1815-1889) had these questions in mind. The date was 7 July 1860, eleven days before the most important solar eclipse of the nineteenth century.
His mission: to settle one of the most hotly (no pun intended) debated astronomical questions of the day: what are the mysterious, tentacular limbs that appear beyond the edge of the Moon during an eclipse? Are these prominences features of the Moon? Are they disturbances from within the Earth’s atmosphere? Or are they a part of the Sun normally obscured by its dazzling glare?
Half telescope, half camera, and designed by de la Rue himself, it was the first instrument made specifically to photograph the Sun. This was also the first occasion where its use might allow a scientific problem in astronomy to be resolved using photography.
De la Rue and his team took over 40 photographs, including two precious shots of totality. With an exposure time in these dimmed conditions of one minute, they were lucky to capture even one.
If prominences were Earth or Moon-based, the observations from different sites ought to differ, but if prominences were solar in origin, they should match. Happily, an Italian Jesuit astronomer named Father Angelo Secchi had established his own observation post a few hundred miles to the south, and he managed to capture some half-decent shots of his own of the Sun at eclipse. Not as clear as those taken using the Kew photoheliograph, these images were just sufficient for the job. By comparing his own shots with those of Secchi’s, de la Rue established that the features observed were identical on each.
The photo of beginning of the eclipse (1860):-
The photo of totality (1860):-
The Kew photoheliograph used (now in Science Museum, London, since 1927)-
First astronomical photo:-
The first astronomical photo was of the moon, taken by John Draper in 1840, using the daguerreotype process itself.
The first photo ever was taken by Louis Daguerre himself, using a camera obscura in 1839, a photo of the moon which came out as a blurry dot, thus being not quite useful but surely remarkable.
The American Physics Society (Jan 2013) states as such:
In 1814, a Frenchman named Nicéphore Niépce began experimenting with ways to record light, and managed to transfer an image to paper two years later via a camera obscura. By 1822, he had figured out how to make such an image permanent by capturing it on a flat sheet of polished tin coated with bitumen. One of the oldest surviving photographs dates back to 1825, when Niépce captured the black-and-white image of an engraving of a boy pulling a horse. But this method required a full eight hours of exposure.
Six years later, French painter and inventor Louis Daguerre– who had worked with Niépce briefly before the latter’s death in 1833–discovered how to reduce exposure time to 20 to 30 minutes. Daguerre had been apprenticed in architecture, theater design, and panoramic painting, and later invented the diorama, and his visual sensibility was fascinated by the potential of Niépce’s research.
Legend has it that he accidentally broke a mercury thermometer, giving him the idea that a shorter exposure time would produce a very faint image, but this image could be further enhanced via a chemical process involving the vapor given off by mercury heated to 75° Celsius. Daguerre then “fixed” the image, so it wouldn’t be sensitive to further exposure to light, by rinsing it in a solution of common salt. The surface was still prone to tarnishing, even by the slightest friction, so most daguerreotypes were sealed under glass before being mounted in a small folding case.
From PetaPixel (Jun 2023), John Draper's photo of the moon (1840) -
From the Grateful American Foundation, John Wipple's photo of the moon (1851) -
From PetaPixel (Jun 2023), John Whipple and James Wallace Black (1857) took this photo using collodion-coated glass negatives -
And a comparison to show the progress of astrophotography as it happened, from Andrew McCarthy and Connor Matherne (2022), named, "The Hunt for Artemis" -
