A Brief History of the Very First Moon Photos Ever Taken

Jun 14, 2023

Matt Growcoot

The very first photo of the Moon and a modern photo of the Moon — The oldest surviving daguerreotype photo of the Moon taken in 1840, left. For comparison, Andrew McCarthy and Connor Mathere’s 174-megapixel image of the Moon taken last year.

As soon as photography was invented, there was a very obvious subject for photographers to turn their cameras toward — the brightest object in the night sky — the Moon.

Louis Dageurre, the inventor of the daguerreotype process, is believed to have taken the very first photo of the Moon in 1839 but his laboratory later burned down destroying his work.

This means that the oldest surviving photo of the Moon was taken by John William Draper from the rooftop observatory at New York University on March 23, 1840. Draper took a 20-minute long exposure using the daguerreotype process and a 5-inch reflecting telescope.

Moon photo from 1840 — John William Draper’s photo of the Moon taken in 1840. He wrote in his laboratory notebook, “This evening I exposed a prepared plate to the moonbeams which had been conveyed by a double convex lens.”

It didn’t take long for photographers to start getting much better photos of our nearest celestial object with John Adams Whipple and James Wallace Black adopting new photography processes to capture a solid Moon photo in 1857.

1857 photos of the Moon — John Adams Whipple and his partner James Wallace Black took this from the Harvard College Observatory using collodion-coated glass negatives.

Detail Moon Photos: Fake it Until You Make it

But people wanted to see more detail of the Moon’s surface. Step forward Scottish inventor James Nasmyth who devised a technique to make plaster casts of the lunar surface.

Nasmyth made them from detailed drawings after observing what he saw through his telescope. The plaster casts were then photographed on Earth and gave Victorian viewers a detailed representation of what the Moon’s surface looks like.

Moon craters — Lunar craters made from plaster cast and photographed in 1874, left. The Korolev crater photographed by the Lunar Orbiter in 2014, right.

Lunar craters made from palster cast — Lunar craters made from plaster cast, 1874.

Keeping it in the Family

William Henry Draper, the man who took the oldest-surviving photo of the Moon, had a son named Henry who inherited his father’s passion for astrophotography and is credited with taking some of the best Moon photos of the 19th century. There are photos of Draper’s astrophotography setup that was in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York,

Moon photo, 1863 — One of the 1,500 photographs of the Moon made by Henry Draper in 1863 | Hastings Historical Society

Henry Draper's telescope — Henry Draper’s observatory where he photographed celestial objects in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. One of his Moon photos is proudly pinned to the wall | Hastings Historical Society

Today, the Moon continues to be an object of fascination for photographers. In 2022, Andrew McCarthy shot two million photos over the course of a month to show how the Moon wobbles in the sky.

Even mobile phones can be used to capture the Moon, a teenager captured an impressive photo of the Moon using his smartphone.