The first photograph of our sun was taken by French Physicists Louis Fizeau and Leon Foucault on April 2nd, 1845. The snapshot was captured using the daguerreotype process (don’t tell Bayard) and resulted after 1/60 of a second. If you observe the photograph carefully, you can spot several sunspots. That vintage photo of the Sun shows our star’s relatively sharp edge as well as a handful of sunspots. The spots are pretty big, roughly as wide as Jupiter (for comparison, the Sun is 1.4 million kilometers across).
If we want to click a picture of the sun, we pick up a camera or a smartphone and snap it in all its magnificence. While it is as easy as that currently, capturing the sun was no easy feat even a couple of centuries ago.
In fact it was only on April 2, 1845 that the first surviving detailed photographs of the surface of the sun were taken. French physicists Armand-Hippolyte-Louis Fizeau and Jean-Bernard-Leon Foucault were the two men who made it happen. Fizeau and Foucault came together through their interest in the Daguerre photographic process that had been recently invented. Even though photography was still in its infancy and its mainstream use in astronomy was still decades away, Fizeau and Foucault decided to turn their camera towards the sun.
While they came together for this project late in the 1830s, adapting the then existing photographic process to astronomy was no easy feat. It took them years, but on April 2, 1845, they succeeded in what they set out to do – capturing the sun in considerable detail. These images are the first surviving detailed daguerreotype photographs of the surface of the sun.
Picture Credit : Google
