On this day in 1839, Louis Daguerre- one of the earliest pioneers of photography- is thought to have taken the first-ever photograph of the Moon… maybe.
The image itself no longer exists, having been destroyed shortly afterward when Daguerre’s studio burned down. As a result, there is no physical evidence of the photograph and historians cannot be certain what it showed, how successful it was, or how clearly the Moon was captured. It could have been anything, from a successful lunar image to a fogged plate with no resemblance to the moon at all. The achievement is therefore usually described with some caution.
Daguerre was one of the pioneers of early photography and the inventor of the daguerreotype (named after him), the first photographic process to be made publicly available. Introduced in 1839, the technique used silver-plated copper sheets and long exposure times, producing highly detailed images but allowing no duplicates. At a time when photography was still in its infancy, many of Daguerre’s works were among the first photographs ever taken of their subjects.
Attempting to photograph the Moon at the time was particularly ambitious. Early photographic equipment required exposures lasting several minutes, while the Moon’s movement and intense brightness made it a difficult subject. Historians believe Daguerre likely attempted the image using a telescope, an approach that would place the photograph among the earliest experiments in astrophotography, even if the result would have been more a glowing blur than the detailed lunar landscapes we’re familiar with.
It remains unclear whether Daguerre repeated the attempt. His primary focus in 1839 was the development and promotion of photography as a practical medium, rather than the pursuit of individual ‘firsts’. The daguerreotype process itself was also time-consuming, expensive, and hazardous- involving the use of toxic mercury vapour in the development process. With the public release of the daguerreotype later that year, photographic experimentation quickly spread beyond its inventor.
Ultimately, whether of not Daguerre succeeded in taking the first photo of the moon remains up for debate. But in a year when photography was new, experimental, and unpredictable, pointing a camera at the night sky and seeing anything at all was an achievement- even if history left us only with the story, and not the picture.
