Photographie Lunaire: Copernic-Képler-Aristarique
1896
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
1896
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Photographie Lunaire: Copernic-Képler-Aristarique is a 1896 by Maurice Loewy, a Impressionism work, depicting Moon, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
This gray photo plate shows the moon’s battered surface near craters named Copernicus and Kepler. It looks like a rough map, full of dots and streaks. The image isn’t a painting—it was made with a telescope Loewy built himself. He added a tracker so the camera could follow the moon’s slow crawl across the sky. Back in the 1890s, clear photos of the moon were rare. Bad weather meant only about fifty nights each year actually worked for shooting. Still, Loewy and his partner took thousands of plates. Their atlas stayed the best moon guide until rockets flew past in the 1960s. Want to see more like this? Look up Maurice Loewy (French, 1833–1907) at The Cleveland Museum of Art.
This plate is from a deluxe 12-volume atlas of the moon created by astronomers Maurice Loewy and Pierre Henri Puiseaux. The atlas remained the most accurate reference of the moon’s surface until the age of space travel. The duo captured thousands of images at the Paris Observatory through a telescope that Loewy invented. It was equipped with a mechanism that tracked the moon’s movements during the exposures. Given weather conditions, they were only able to photograph 50 to 60 nights per year; the project thus took 15 years to complete and contained nearly 100 large-scale photogravures.
Read the full account in the museum source.
