72 president's adijress — section a. 



and expresses the opinion that it would be possible to make the 

 sun and moon record their oavii features by photograph)- ; and, 

 acting upon this suggestion, Daguerre tried, and failed to get any- 

 thing more than a very faint impression, from which all detail was 

 absent. In Arago's Popular Astronomy there is reproduced a 

 daguerreotype of the sun, taken, as stated on it, on April 2nd, 1845, 

 by MM. Foucalt and Fizeau, but no particulars are given. The 

 long exposure of twenty minutes required to get a daguerreotype 

 of the moon no doubt deterred many who would have tried, and it 

 was only the genius of Bond, coupled with the great refractor, 

 which enabled him to get the first really valuable photograph of 

 the lunar surface. It appears in Astron. Nachrichten, No. 1105, 

 that the artists Whipple and Black (of Boston) "for many years 

 before this " had been experimenting whenever they could get the 

 use of the great telescope, and that the earliest successful experi- 

 ments were made with daguerreotype plates in July, 1850; but 

 the labor and time demanded was so great that he was obliged to 

 put the work aside until he should be able to get improved instru- 

 mental appliances. Some of the photographs obtained were taken 

 to England and exhibited at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical 

 Society on May 9th, 1850, again at the meeting of the British 

 Association in September following, and then at the Great Exhibi- 

 tion in 1851 ; and they were so good that they may be said to have 

 taken the scientific world by storm, but I find at this time no 

 description of what they did show of the moon's surface. The 

 result might have been anticipated. Everybody who could com- 

 mand a telescope from 4in. to 6ft. tried to photograph the moon 

 with such means as he had, and in one case they induced an 

 astronomer, Mr. De La Rue, to become a worker, and his energy 

 and success did very much to promote the study of astronomical 

 photography I have said that at the time no measure of what 

 was meant by '• good " photographs of the moon was given, but 

 four years later we find a measure of the term good applitid to 

 them. In the British Association Report for 1854, p. 10, the Rev. 

 J. B. Reade, M.A., F.R.S., writes: — "The daguerreotype produced 

 in the Bond refractor possesses a latent sharjiness which is difficult 

 to see, but which was brought out by taking a copy of it with a 

 camera. This copy was compared with his owai photograph, and 

 he found in both the Mare Crisium with bright surrounding 

 country which separates it from Mare Fecunditatis, and Mare 

 Tranquilitatis, the crater Menelans, and the ray of light extending 

 from it across the Mare Serenitatis, the semicircular ridge round 

 Mare Imbrium and the unreflective crater Plato,"* so that Bond's 

 picture of the moon must have possessed a large amount of 

 detail, 



Mr. Dancer^, of Manchester, seems to have been the first in 

 England to follow Bond's lead, and in February, 1852, made some 

 sharp jjictures of the moon, using a 4i-in. equatorial. These are 



