To observe the sky is not only an instant short-term observation: the understanding of celestial phenomena needs to refer to an evolution in time, to a long-term observation.
This dualism between the discovery of a phenomenon in the moment and the discovery of cyclic phenomena over a long period of time is at the base of astrophysics.
The invention of the photography/telescope combination allowed astronomical observation was allowed to suddenly go in depth, to make use of depth of field and focus. Astrophysics were born from coupling the contents of physics to the astronomic observations and from the use of those two to create idoneous models to justify what had been observed.
However, physics provide suitable techniques to modify the "eye centric" vision that tends to induce anthropocentric approaches in the description and interpretation of the universe.
For the human eye a star is a twinkling shiny spot, and the same goes for a photo plate that has a lot in common with the retina, as well as with CCD-sensors, but the vision changes if we consider other wave-lengths in the spectrum. The dualism does not change.
The photo technique supplies frames/stills, but astronomic phenomena are slow = to make a film-shoot to capture a single longer term observation, one would need an endless number of photograms. We would need to show it through a time-lapse to grasp its effect. And this is not exhaustive. The variability of phenomena is infinite: everyday there are new exotic events either in our solar system or in the universe at large. The point is that what we see is different from what we observe.
The first event is (almost always) after the second in the sense that the observation is much more (in potential) than that focusing our interpretation of the observed leads us to see in the observed a seen.
Even more so when this is the outcome of a multiplicity of observations placed in relation to each other. For a while in the past an instrument called the “blinker” was used a lot. It was a method to highlight and therefore elevate the OBSERVED to something SEEN and the machine was making a comparison among photo plates. Today the blinker has been substituted by digital techniques and AI tools (The Blink Comparator (youtube.com)
Another problem even for those who would like to shoot Audio-Visuals would always be the sensitivity of the film or digital medium combined with the problem that few photons would arrive at our altitude in any case.
Night photography is therefore an exceptionally difficult art to master to this day, given the fact that cinematic devices rely on light to function. After the first daylight photography was taken in 1822 it took almost twenty years to realize the same feature at night. In 1839, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype method, is credited to have taken the first photograph at night, even if it was actually a blurry picture of the moon taken through a telescope.
1840 John William Draper, a New York University Professor in Chemistry and a physician, used a complex method involving a double convex lens and a specially prepared development plate to capture the moon. He took a 20 minute long daguerreotype image using a 5 inch reflecting telescope.
The picture above on the left shows the daguerreotype before and after its restoration at the Smithsonian, the one on the right an intervention done with Adobe AI enhancers, to see how much further the photograph could be manoeuvred into darkness.
The halo around the celestial object became a distinctive feature of many night-time shots. It was also the start of a trend in astrophotography, where distant stars were impressed on film, using cameras connected to telescopes.
