The first photographic eclipse?

Abstract

Peter D Hingley describes the first concerted effort to observe an eclipse by photography, by the British Himalaya Expedition in Spain in 1860. Warren De La Rue and the British expedition to Spain to observe the total solar eclipse of 18 July 1860 broke new ground in many senses. Illustrations from albums held in the RAS Archives include what may be the earliest photographs of participants in an eclipse expedition, as well as outstanding images of partial and total phases of the eclipse. In addition, it is suggested that the expedition led to the first definite scientific result to be found from astrophotography and to the invention by De La Rue of what later became known as the plate measuring machine.

Celestial Shadows

“…The moment of Contact I, wrote his neighbor, the physician Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), "excited … an emotion of delight so exquisite and powerful, as to induce fainting" (Rush 1806 : 340). A more recent biographer, Brooke Hindle (1918Hindle ( -2001, interprets Rittenhouse's collapse psychoanalytically, and ties it to the ambiguous appearances of the circlet of light and the black drop: "The crisis of tension was brought to an almost intolerable intensity in the terrifying appearance of Venus on the Sun. Whatever he had read … Rittenhouse was unprepared for the yawning uncertainty of the exact moment at which he must declare that Venus had fi rst touched the Sun.…”

Cajal on Solar Eclipse

“…3), the first recorded coronal mass ejection [8]. It appears to be the first concerted effort – by Warren De La Rue (1815–1889) and the British Himalaya Expedition – to record a solar eclipse photographically [9]; the same expedition led to the invention of what would later become known as a ‘plate-measuring machine’ [9]. De La Rue built a special telescope, equipped with a photoheliograph, to observe the sun and to record sunspots, which he carried to Southern Spain.…”