DEPTH OF FIELD
Dealer in original historical
and fine art photographic prints
WARREN DE LA RUE
Moonstruck | Lunar Stereographs
Photographer Warren de la Rue
1815 -1889
The Moon itself is impressive, but the effort required to take these pictures make these photographs particularly impressive.
To make a stereo image requires two slightly different images to be overlaid with mostly the same detail, but enough subtle differences to make the image three-dimensional. However, taking pictures of something as distant as the Moon would require the two lenses to be incredibly far apart. An alternative method, would be to take two photographs that are very far apart in time. That is the method that was used by Warren De La Rue to take these stereo-images. For example, the previous set of Moon pictures are separated by more than a year.
The first one was taken on 27 February 1858, and the second on 11 September 1859. The first was when the Moon was 14.2 days old, and in the second it was 14.8 days old, allowing the two images to be just different enough to create the three-dimensional-effect when observed through a viewer.
To produce this effort, the chemist, astronomer and gentleman-adventurer Warren de la Rue (1815–1889) set about designing a large telescope for his own private observatory near London. It was completed in 1849, and improved when he moved to a better observatory around 1857.
De la Rue wasn’t the first to take photographs through a telescope; but his telescope was - as far we know - the first to be designed and built with photography in mind.
