Fake Lunar Photos Sent Astronomers Over the Moon
If you wanted close-up photos of the moon in the late 1800s, you were pretty much out of luck. Unless, of course, you built incredibly detailed plaster models of lunar craters and then snapped carefully lit pictures of them.
James Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam hammer, and James Carpenter, then at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, released a hugely successful book, The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, illustrated by their incredible moon mock-ups. The august journal Nature gave the book a rapturous review.
"The illustrations to this book are so admirable, so far beyond those one generally gets of any celestial phenomenon, that one is tempted to refer to them first of all," the reviewer wrote. "No more truthful or striking representations of natural objects than those here presented have ever been laid before his readers by any student of Science; and I may add that, rarely if ever, have equal pains been taken to insure such truthfulness."
But what's really appealing about the images isn't their "truthfulness" but their "truthiness," said Corey Keller, the curator of a new exhibit, Brought to Light, on early scientific photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
"Astronomers were perfectly aware of what they were looking at," Keller, whose exhibit includes the book's photos, said. "But they felt that because they were photographed, it added a layer of authenticity to the undertaking that simple drawings didn't have."
Looking at these photos, astronomers could get the feeling of actually being there, which is the same desire that has driven manned space exploration throughout the last half-century.
"It wasn't possible to actually make those photographs of the moon," she noted.
Imaging the moon, after all, was an immensely difficult task. Even as 19th-century photographers and dagguerreotypists figured out the basics of taking pictures of the moon, they were limited by the immense distance separating them from their subject. In fact, it wasn't until the Apollo missions landed on the surface of our only natural satellite that humans were able to make real versions of these mock-ups.