One of the earliest known astrophotographs, a daguerreotype plate that pictured moon on February 26, 1852 by astronomer John Adams Whipple at Harvard College Observatory. There are over 500,000 glass photographic plates in the Harvard collection from both northern and southern hemisphere sky between 1885 and 1993. This 100 year coverage is a unique resource for studying temporal variations in the universe, and its now being digitalized in a long term project named Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard. In the late 1840s John Adams Whipple undertook a series of experiments with William Cranch Bond, Director of the Harvard College Observatory. By 1851, using the Observatory's fifteen-inch refracting telescope, one of the two largest in the world at the time, the photographer and astronomer had succeeded in creating a clear, detailed rendering of the moon. That same year the exemplary daguerreotype was awarded a gold medal at the Crystal Palace Exhibition, and the French Academy of Sciences proclaimed the image as "the finest production ever brought before them. Date: Oct. 2012