An albumen print of the moon by Rutherfurd. On original, slightly trimmed, CDV mount. Difficult to read stamp on the verso of the publisher: Albert Ballerstaedt Hof-Photograph, Danzig. On the front, "1861" is written in brown fountain pen.

Lewis Morris Rutherfurd (1816-1892) was a passionate amateur in astronomy. He has a special place in both histories of photography and astronomy as a pioneer of the photography as a tool of the astronomer.

Inspired by Harvard’s Great Refractor, Rutherfurd constructed a fourteen-foot-long telescope in the backyard of his New York home. He quit his successful day job as a lawyer and devoted himself to astrophotography—a field he soon transformed by inventing a new telescopic lens. Because photographic plates are sensitive to a different spectrum of light than the naked eye, astronomers had to focus their instruments by trial and error. In 1864 Rutherfurd solved this problem by devising an achromatic lens specially corrected for the light sensitivity of the photographic plate. By disregarding human sight in favor of the camera’s eye, he managed to produce extraordinarily precise images of the moon, widely celebrated for their beauty. [MetMuseum]

Good condition with normal traces of age and use.