GIF 1849a

I’d like to personally thank Samuel D. Humphrey for standing outside on the evening of September 1, 1849 and taking these daguerreotypes of the moon:

He was screwing around with different exposures, from half a second to two minutes. (Looks like 2 seconds worked out best, Sam.) For the record, moonrise that day was around 6:18 PM.

He would obviously have made this into a GIF, so here you go, albeit 163 years later:

More on present and past moontography here.

UPDATE: looks like 3 seconds was the best exposure:

The lunar surface in the three-second exposure was, as the Annual of Scientific Discovery noted, “so perfect, that its appearance, when examined under the microscope, somewhat resembled the full moon seen through a telescope.”