Electric Illumination
Each week at the Caltech Archives Instagram account, we’ll be sharing a sneak peek into our exhibition for PST ART 2024—Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920-2020. Before the invention of high-powered cameras, co-authors James Nasmyth and James Carpenter photographed models and everyday objects under electric illumination, attempting to replicate the moon's surface. In 1847, Nasmyth and Carpenter published their photographs in The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite. The book and its imagery had enough of an impact that NASA named a crater on the moon for Nasmyth.
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