THE EARLY HISTORY OF ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY. By Peter Abrahams. The birth of the age of photography was at the first public announcement of Louis Daguerre's process, in January of 1839, when the Daguerrotype became available to the world. The speech was given by Francois Arago, who combined careers as an astronomer and a politician, and was an early supporter of Daguerre. Months before this announcement, Daguerre had made a photograph of the moon at the request of Arago, producing a clear impression, by 1838 standards. It seems that astrophotography preceded photography, which is reflected today by astro- CCD imaging arriving before snapshot CCD imaging. Furthermore, Arago predicted at a very early date that photography would be used to make maps of the moon. He developed the fundamentals of photographic photometry when both fields had barely begun. And when spectroscopy had just found absorption lines in the solar spectrum, Arago wondered if the lines extended into the almost invisible blue light that was used for Daguerrotypes. He is also quoted as noting that what we hope for out of this new instrument is nothing compared with the unimagined succession of discoveries that it will bring. Photography spread around the world in a very short time after its announcement, and its use in astronomy developed at an equally fast pace. In 1842, the first recognizeable picture of the sun was taken by the French instrument maker Lerebours. Leon Foucault and Armand Fizeau were more successful in April of 1845, with an exposure of 1/60 second. Their Daguerrotype sun was almost 5 inches in diameter and was sharp enough to show the sunspots. In America, J.W. Draper had for years experimented with spectroscopy, and in 1843 he put a Daguerrotype plate in a spectrum of the sun and thereby discovered several new absorption lines the the ultra violet area. In 1842, the partially eclipsed sun was photographed by the Austrian astronomer Majocchi; and in 1851, a Daguerrotype of solar eclipse totality showed the prominences and corona in a 24 second exposure. In Paris, during the March, 1858 eclipse, a series of timed photographs gave an accurate apparent diameter of the sun. Before photography, there was some question as to whether the prominences seen during eclipses were actually solar phenomena. The question was settled when the prominences were photographed and plotted from Spain during the total eclipse of July, 1860. Pioneer astrophysicist Angelo Secchi used 20 second exposures, and amateur astrophotographer Warren de la Rue used 60 second exposures to capture the prominences and inner corona. De la Rue used a solar telescope of his own design, made by the famous instrument maker Andrew Ross, with a 3 1/2 inch objective corrected for the blue- violet colors that early photographic processes were sensitive to. From 1858 to 1872, de la Rue used this photohelioscope at Kew Observatory in England to record the complete 11 year solar cycle in a series of almost 3000 collodion wet plates that clearly showed spots and faculae. Eyepiece projection was used to enlarge the image on the plate, and to achieve short exposures, a spring-loaded curtain shutter with a narrow slit was placed at the focal plane. The 1874 transit of Venus was photographed from Japan by the French physicist Pierre Janssen with a 5 1/2 refractor by Prazmowski designed for photographing the sun. The objective was corrected for approximately 4300 angstroms, the area that collodion plates were most sensitive to, according to Janssen's experiments. The image of the sun was projected to different sizes, from 4 to 27 inches, and a curtain shutter gave exposures from 1/500 to 1/6000 second. Thousands of pictures were taken, and the best showed granulation on the sun for the first time, with a resolution of one to three arc seconds. This Venus transit of 1874 is remembered for the many efforts to determine the distance of the sun using the time of entry of Venus into the solar disk from various locations across the earth. Both Daguerrotypes and collodion plates were taken by the score to supplement visual timings, but they all failed due to atmospheric blurring and the black drop effect and general disagreement as to exact time of entry. The many more recent discoveries and technical advancements in solar photography are arbitrarily classed as modern astronomical photography and are not the subject of this paper. Alpha Lyrae was the subject of the first portrait taken of a star, in July of 1850. Using a 100 second exposure, a Daguerrotype of Vega was taken with the Harvard College Observatory's 15 inch Merz and Mahler refractor. The drive of this telescope was not up to the task of longer exposures, and after improvements were made, the binary system Mizar and Alcor was photographed in a collodion exposure in March of 1857. Measurements were made of position angle using a micrometer on the photo, and a new level of accuracy was achieved due to the averaging of atmospheric tremor over the eighty second exposure. Vega was also the subject of the first stellar spectrograph, taken by Henry Draper in 1872, using a 28 inch reflector and a quartz prism, who discovered four lines of hydrogen in the near ultra violet region of the spectrum. As astrophotography developed, the enormous numbers of faint stars found in more sensitive plates gave rise to the idea of a photographic atlas of the sky. Most of these projects ended up as collections of plates, notably the Harvard College Observatory collection. Others were published as printed atlases whose star positions were derived from photographs. The most ambitious atlas was the Carte du Ciel (Map of the Sky) based at the Paris Observatory but involving observatories world-wide, begun in the 1880s and unfinished to this day. The first photograph of a nebula was taken in September 1880 by Henry Draper, using an 11 inch Alvan Clark refractor designed for photography. The Orion nebula was recorded on a silver bromide dry plate in a 51 minute exposure, but only the brightest inner portion could be seen. The entire nebula was photographed in a 137 minute exposure by Draper in March of 1882. The first nebula discovered by photography was the nebulosity around the Pleiades; found by Paul and Prosper Henry, brothers at the Paris Observatory, in November of 1885. William Huggins produced the first photograph of the spectrum of a nebula in March of 1882, in a 45 minute exposure of Orion. One of the five emission lines recorded was a new discovery in the ultra violet region. The first photographs of the Andromeda nebula were taken by A.A. Common in 1884, using a 36 inch Calver glass mirror. The spectrum of Andromeda was of great interest at this time, due to the debate over galaxies external to the Milky Way. In January of 1899, a 7 1/2 hour exposure by J. Scheiner at Potsdam Observatory in Germany revealed the spectrum to be without emission lines and stellar in nature. The issue was not settled for another 20 years, when photographs taken at the new 100 inch Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson resolved Andromeda into individual stars and revealed Cepheid variables among them. The moon was the first celestial object to be photographed, and the massive Kuiper Photographic Lunar Atlas of 1960 continues the tradition. This will be the subject of a future chapter, as will the planets, and prehaps the most beautiful photos, those of comets. The subject of greatest interest to me, how telescope design was influenced by the requirements of photography, will be the next installment. References: Wallis, Brad, and Robert Provin; A Manual of Advanced Celestial Photography, Cambridge, Cambridge U. Pr., 1988. The best book on the subject, has a good 17 page chapter on history, and a very good list of references in the bibliography. De Vaucoulers, Gerard; Astronomical Photography, From the Daguerreotype to the Electron Camera. NY, Macmillan, 1961. This one hundred page introduction is good but sketchy. King, Henry; The History of the Telescope. Cambridge, Sky Publishing, 1955 (still available from Dover.) 456pp, by far the best work on telescope history, fair amount of material on photography. Learner, Richard; Astronomy Through the Telescope. NY, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1981. 224pp, excellent illustrations, some background on astrophotography. Sky and Telescope has had many good articles on the history of astrophotography, Astronomy has had a few, and the general histories of astronomy have some material on the subject. Captions: Tennant: 9 inch Newtonian, mirror by George With, mount by John Browning, 1860s. Used by J.F. Tennant at the solar eclipse in India in 1868. Clock drive stopped during totality. Grubb: 20 inch reflector by Howard Grubb, made in 1885 for Isaac Roberts, who used it to take the first photo of the Andromeda nebula that showed spiral structure, 1887. CartCiel: Astrometry in the early days. Measuring plates that were taken by telescopes participating in the Carte du Ciel, a project based at the Paris Observatory in the 1890s and beyond, with a goal of photographically mapping the entire sky. 18 observatories were to contribute 10,000 plates. The effort was premature and a failure, photometry was without a scale of values and the effects of seeing, exposure times, etc. were not quantified. ================================================= VARIOUS NOTES: first comet disc. w’ telescope:11/1680, Godfrey Kirch, Coburg, Germany first comet disc. w’ photograph, May 17, 1882, photo of solar eclipse from Egypt showed sungrazing comet, not otherwise observed, ‘Tewfik’s Comet’ (T=ruler Egypt). first successful photo comet, David Gill, Cape of Good Hope, Sept. 1882 Apr. 9, 837, Halley’s comet within 6 million km, traversed over 60 degrees of sky in one day, 100 degree tail. Chinese records November 27, 1885 The earliest photograph of a meteor shower was made in Prague, Czechoslovakia. >From: Patrick Poitevin August 07, 1869 The Baily's beads were first photographed at the eclipse of August 7, 1869 by C. F. Hines and members of the Philadelphia Photographic Corps, observing from Ottumwa, Iowa. January 24, 1925 Todd also was passionately interested in total solar eclipses, and traveled to a dozen of them at a time when expeditions often lasted for many months. He photographed the New England total eclipse of January 24, 1925 from an airplane, and some sources credit him with being the first astronomer to photograph the sun's corona from an airplane. Richard Sanderson 6/97 January 25, 1908 The corona of the Sun was photographed for the first time. July 08, 1842 First attempt to photograph a total eclipse was made by the Austrian astronomer Majocci. He failed to record totality, though he did succeed in photographing the partial phase. July 18, 1860 First wet plate photographs of an eclipse; they require 1/30 of the exposure time of a daguerreotype. July 18, 1860 Warren De La Rue (UK) and Angelo Secchi (Italy) use photography during a solar eclipse in Spain to demonstrate that prominences (and hence at least that region of the corona) are part of the Sun, not light scattered by the Earth's atmosphere or the edge of the Moon, because the corona looks the same from sides 250 miles apart. July 28, 1851 The first photograph of a total eclipse was taken in 1851 by Berkowski in Konigsbert, East Prussia using the 6.25 in Königsberg heliometer and giving an exposure of 24 s. September 18, 1819 Birth of J. Foucault, French physician. Photographed the sun and measured the speed of light together with Armand Fizeau. (ref. D. Devlies 9/98) end. >From: Peter D Hingley I am trying to write up an album of photos we have, on Warren De La Rue and George Biddell Airy's party on their trip to Rivabellosa, Spain , for the Eclipse of 1860 July 18.... usually regarded as the first serious photographic eclipse expedition , though there had in fact been various earlier efforts, and De La Rue secured about 40 plates including a stunning one of totality. As well as some of these and deck views on the troopship that took them there , HMS HIMALAYA ( it was referred to at the time as the HIMALAYA expedition) there are four views of the particiapants, some complete with donkeys and ladies, and one which from the dress and the demeanour of the observers may be the American party. ============================ 6