History of Astrophotography Timeline

The history of Astrophotography cannot be separated from that of General Photography, each helping to improve the processes and techniques of the other.

The first real effort to create a permanent photographic image was carried out in the early years of the 19th century by Thomas Wedgewood, the youngest son of Josiah Wedgewood the famous potter.

The earliest known permanent photograph was created in 1825 by Joseph Nicephore Niepce, a French Inventor which shows a young boy leading a horse into a stable. This was followed in 1835 by William Henry Fox Talbot who created the first permanent negative image of a window in his home at Laycock Abbey, England. From this negative image as many positive images as required can be created.

In January 1839 Francois Arago announced the discovery of the Daguerreotype Process (a permanent image on a copper metal plate coated with silver) to the French National Academy of Sciences. This sparked the controversy between Daguerre and Fox Talbot as to who really invented photography.

Recent evidence (2008) indicates that Thomas Wedgewood created a permanent photographic image as early as 1804-5. If true then it was he alone who had invented Photography and not Niepce, Daguerre or Fox Talbot.

By 1840 the Daguerreotype had been introduced to the United States, and the chemicals used in the process were first manufactured there by John Adams Whipple. In that year John William Draper took the first successful photograph an astronomical object when he imaged the Moon.

In the 1840s photographs of the Sun were obtained by Armand Fizeau and Jean Foucault at the Paris Observatory.

A Total Solar Eclipse was photographed for the first time in 1851 by M. Berkowski of Dresden, Germany.

On the 19th July 1850 John Adams Whipple and William Cranch Bond (the first Director of the Harvard College observatory) imaged a star – Vega, Alpha Lyrae.

George Phillips Bond (the son of William Bond) followed this up in 1857 by taking images of fainter stars, and in that year obtained the first photograph of a Double star – Mizar (Zeta Ursa Majoris) and its companion Alcor.

The ‘holy grail’ of Astrophotography was achieved on the 30th September 1880 when Henry Draper (son of William Draper) obtains the first ever successful image of a Deep Space Object, the ‘Great Orion’ Nebula, M42.

From the 1880s onwards the likes of Andre Common, Isaac Roberts, Edward Barnard , James Keeler and George Ritchie began to take many more photographs of star clusters, nebulae and galaxies of ever increasing quality.

It was not until 1885 that the first successful (extant) planetary photographs were obtained by the two brothers Paul and Prosper Henry. Although William Bond records in the reports of the Harvard College Observatory that John Adams Whipple took images of Jupiter as early as March 1851, tantalizingly neither the quality of these images or their whereabouts is known.

In 1887 work began on the first ever Photographic Sky survey, the ill-fated Carte du Ciel Project. It was later abandoned as being over ambitious and was unable to provide machine readable data. The data from it was not entirely wasted when the Hipparcos astrometry satellite (launched in 1989) made valuable use of it determining the proper motions of 2.5 million stars.

The introduction of commercially produced dry photographic plates in the 1880s and by the transparent emulsion photographic film in 1889 began to make photography accessible to all.

Early photographic plates and films were sensitive to blue light only. Hermann Wilhelm Vogel discovered that the spectral sensitivity could be extended by dye sensitization. Orthochromatic film sensitive to the spectral range from green to blue was introduced in 1879 and was dominant until the mid-1920s, when panchromatic film sensitive to the entire visual spectrum became standard. All of these films were used to produce black-and-white images, regardless of spectral sensitivity.

Experiments with colour photography were first made in 1861 by James Clerk Maxwell, but generally usable colour films only became available in the 1930s. After World War II, much progress was made, and colour became used for the overwhelming majority of photographs

The introduction of digital CCD images in the 1990s has revolutionized astrophotography. It is now possible for an amateur with modest equipment to obtain photographs of far better quality than those taken by say the 200" Hale telescope back in the 1950s (and in colour too!).

The launch of the Hubble Space telescope in 1990 has brought us such wonderful images that have inspired us to try emulating its achievements.

Thomas Wedgewood

James Clerk Maxwell

Spectra of Procyon

Inventor of Photography?

Inventor Colour Photography

William Huggins

Date Name Type Event
1800 Thomas Wedgwood Photography Thomas Wedgwood (1771-1805) produces "sun pictures" by placing opaque objects on leather treated with silver nitrate. The resulting images deteriorated rapidly.
1804 Thomas Wedgwood Photography In 2008 one of the major historians of early British photography, Dr Larry J Schaaf, has suggested at length that a surviving photogenic drawing of a leaf (attributed to William Fox Talbot) could in fact be by Thomas Wedgwood, and might date from 1804 or 1805. If this can be confirmed, then Wedgwood would be the true inventor of the standard photographic process and not Niepce, Fox Talbot or Daguerre.
1816 Joseph Niepce Photography Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833) combines the camera obscura with photosensitive paper.
1825 Joseph Niepce Photography In 2002, an earlier surviving photograph which had been taken by Niépce was found in a French photograph collection. The photograph was found to have been taken in 1825, and it was an image of an engraving of a young boy leading a horse into a stable. The photograph itself later sold for 450,000 euros at an auction to the French National Library.
1826 Joseph Niepce Photography Joseph Niépce produces the first permanent image (Heliograph) using a camera obscura and white bitumen. It shows a view out of a window over roof tops at Le Gras, France. Prior to 2002 it was thought to be the oldest surviving photograph.
1829 Joseph Niepce & Louis Daguerre Photography Niépce and Louis Daguerre (1787-1851) sign a ten year agreement to work in partnership developing their new recording medium.
1834 William Henry Fox Talbot Photography Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) creates permanent (negative) images using paper soaked in silver chloride and fixed with a salt solution. Talbot created positive images by contact printing onto another sheet of paper. Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, published in six instalments between 1844 and 1846 was the first book to be illustrated entirely with photographs.
1837 Loius Daguerre Photography Louis Daguerre creates images on silver-plated copper, coated with silver iodide and "developed" with warmed mercury (daguerreotype).
1838 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Astronomical Determines the distance of the star 61 Cygni, by measuring its parallax.
1839 François Arago Astrophotography François Jean Dominique Arago (1786-1853) announces the daguerreotype process at the French Academy of Sciences (January, 7 and August, 19). Arago predicts the future use of the photographic technique in the fields of selenography, photometry and spectroscopy.
1839 John Herschel Photography John Frederick William Herschel (1792-1871) uses for the first time the term Photography (meaning writing with light).
1839 Loius Daguerre Photography Louis Daguerre patents the daguerreotype. The daguerreotype process is released for general use in return for annual state pensions given to Daguerre and Isidore Niépce (Louis Daguerre’s son): 6000 and 4000 francs respectively.

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