Key Takeaways:
- Harvard University hired its first astronomer in 1839.
- Public interest in astronomy increased after comet sightings.
- Harvard Observatory obtained a large telescope and took the first-ever photo of a star (excluding the Sun) in 1850.
- This photo was a 90-second exposure of the star Vega.
In 1839, the president of Harvard University invited William Bond to move into a house on campus and, by virtue of bringing along his own astronomical equipment, become the university’s first astronomer in residence. With public interest spurred by the 1835 passage of Halley’s Comet and the Comet of 1843, Harvard soon had enough money to establish an actual observatory, and ordered a 15-inch refracting telescope. Working with daguerreotypist John Adams Whipple, Bond took a 90-second exposure of Vega – the first photograph ever taken of a star (besides the Sun) – with that scope at Harvard College Observatory on the night of July 16-17, 1850. Pioneers in the nascent field of astrophotography, they’d go on to image the Moon the following year.
