When Isaac Roberts captured the first photo of the Andromeda Galaxy in 1888, common consensus was he was gazing at a nebula. Credit: Courtesy Linda Hall Library
After Welsh amateur astronomer Isaac Roberts retired from his career in engineering and manufacturing, he devoted his life to imaging the heavens. Using a 20-inch reflector with a 7-inch refractor mounted on the top for tracking, Roberts established a personal observatory in Merseyside and developed techniques for long-exposure astrophotography. From there, on Dec. 29, 1888, he captured the first photograph of the Andromeda Galaxy (then known as the Andromeda Nebula). Roberts and contemporary scientists thought the spiral structure meant they were gazing at a star system midformation; it wouldn’t be until Edwin Hubble’s analysis of cosmic distances in the 1930s that the object was understood to be a neighboring galaxy.
