First Daguerreotype from 1830?

[Heroique]

“At Brussels, I read in the newspaper that experiments in photography have been made at Cambridge with an idea of getting an image of the sun, the moon and even the stars; of the star Alpha, in the Lyre, they obtained an impression the size of a pinhead. The letter which reports this result makes an observation as exact as it is curious: that since the light of the star which was daguerreotyped took twenty years to traverse the space separating it from the earth, the ray which was fixed on the plate had consequently left the celestial sphere a long time before Daguerre had discovered the process by means of which we have just gained control of this light.” (Eugene Delacroix, Journals, August 13th, 1850)

So this got me thinking: if the daguerreotype described above was processed the same year Delacroix wrote about it, should we say the earliest light used to make a Daguerreotype was from 1830?

Heck, that’s several years in advance of Louis Jacques Daguerre’s 1837 image below!

[Heroique]

Well, now I learn that modern estimates put Alpha Centauri (is that the “Alpha” star Delacriox meant?) closer to 4 light years away. But it still leaves me curious: did more distant stars "in the Lyre" twinkle on that plate?

[Maris Rusis]

There is light on the way to us from the furthest reaches of the universe that won't arrive for billions of years; long after we, the earth, and the sun have been reduced to alternative arrangements of atoms. That's the bad news.

The good news is that because light travels at 300 000 Km per second we can eliminate those nasty distant backgrounds by just choosing a fast enough shutter speed. At 1/1000 second nothing further away than 300 Km should register. Right?

Maybe the above has not been fully thought through.

[Michael Alpert]

Since you seem to be enamored with simplicity (though you also distrust it), I would begin with the first light at the beginning of the Universe and move forward from there.

[Heroique]

There is light on the way to us from the furthest reaches of the universe that won't arrive for billions of years; long after we, the earth, and the sun have been reduced to alternative arrangements of atoms. […]

I just wanted to have some fun with this, but now I’m in despair.

Since you seem to be enamored with simplicity (though you also distrust it), I would begin with the first light at the beginning of the Universe and move forward from there.

However, visible light didn't come into being until approximately 380,000 years after the BIG BANG.

I wonder if Daguerreotypes were impossible to make for that brief period of early time!

[Robert Hughes]

Back then they had to rely on X-ray film!

[Michael Alpert]

However, visible light didn't come into being until approximately 380,000 years after the BIG BANG.

I wonder if Daguerreotypes were impossible to make for that brief period of early time!

My guess is that Daguerreotypes were impossible then--or at least were not as sharp; but I have limited experience. Perhaps some older photographer who reads this forum can supply a more definitive answer.

To say "visible light didn't come into being until . . . " is a thought-provoking formulation. I think of light as always becoming, not as a thing that has being in the same sense as objects. In that way, light is like life itself.