Astronomy

Lewis Rutherfurd circa. 1893

LEWIS MORRIS RUTHERFURD - LAWYER, ASTRONOMER & PIONEERING ASTROPHOTOGRAPHER

"Inspired by Harvard’s Great Refractor, Rutherfurd constructed a fourteen-foot-long telescope in the backyard of his New York home. He quit his successful day job as a lawyer and devoted himself to astrophotography—a field he soon transformed by inventing a new telescopic lens. Because photographic plates are sensitive to a different spectrum of light than the naked eye, astronomers had to focus their instruments by trial and error. In 1864 Rutherfurd solved this problem by devising an achromatic lens specially corrected for the light sensitivity of the photographic plate. By disregarding human sight in favor of the camera’s eye, he managed to produce extraordinarily precise images of the moon, widely celebrated for their beauty." - MetMuseum.org

"... photographic plates represent the painstaking way astronomers used to work, hand-positioning a telescope on an object for long enough to capture it on a glass plate coated with emulsion, then developing the plate like film in a darkroom. The first daguerreotype photograph of a star other than the sun was taken in 1850 by William Cranch Bond, the first director of Harvard College Observatory, who made a 90-second exposure of Vega. For the next 150 years or so, scientists catalogued the universe on these glass plates, about as thick as a window pane."

- Smithsonian Magazine What the Obsolete Art of Mapping the Skies on Glass Plates Can Still Teach Us

Left: Late 19th or early 20th century slide showing an illustrated depiction of the Earth viewed from the Moon (a scene not witnessed in real life until 1968!) - photographed on a light table

Above: The original handwritten paper label affixed to the right margin of the slide (slides would usually be stored vertically with the label positioned upwards for easy identification)