Photography’s contribution to the science of Astronomy
Posted in General, History on September 10th, 2009 by Peter Lipscomb170 years ago, Sir John Herschel exposed the first glass plate photograph. The subject was the 40 foot telescope used by his father, William Herschel. The elder Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781. And in collaboration with his sister, Caroline, he observed numerous comets and thousands of nebulae and star clusters. To make his photograph, John Herschel used a silver chloride solution. But the processing method was so time-consuming and tedious that it wasn’t widely adopted.
