Photographing the Moon: One Man’s Quest to Capture the Lunar Surface
Tucked away on Observatory Hill, a spectacular array of lunar photographs resides in the Harvard College Observatory’s Astronomical Photographic Glass Plate Collection. The collection holds astronomers’ early attempts to photograph the Moon. The earliest photographs capture the lunar surface on glass. The images feel soft and indistinct, and the lunar crescents are elusive, flickering in and out of view as you tilt the reflective surface.
The collection also holds later images: prints of photographs taken with more advanced techniques. Among the most striking are the prints of Lewis Morris Rutherfurd, a lawyer and amateur astronomer from New York. The photographs were taken in the 1860s and 1870s, then compiled and disseminated in a print collection ranging from crescent to gibbous. The surface of the Moon is resolved with impossible detail, overwhelming the viewer with texture, shape, color, and variety. Its mottled gray surface is broken up by white impact craters, and pale streaks burst from the craters almost like starlight.
Rutherfurd’s images represent just one of many different efforts to touch and access the Moon. However, they are significant because they were taken with the first telescope, designed by Rutherfurd, to operate solely for the purpose of photography rather than seeing by eye. Photographic plates are not sensitive to the same spectrum of light as the eye, so Rutherfurd built a lens system that corrected for this difference. For the first time in the history of science, Rutherfurd compromised human sight in favor of an objective scientific process.