First photomicrography, micro-cinematography, electron micrography, astrophotography, astro-cinematography, and radar & radio astronomy

Photomicrography

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) was taking photographs through a microscope as early as 1837 [Frizot], and the above is an example of a photomicrograph taken using the earliest process he used, photogenic drawing. This is picture ref. 10453154 in the Science & Society Picture Library, where it's not dated; as reproduced in Burbridge it's dated as c. 1840, but in Keller c. 1839, and in Jeffrey 1839 (Keller also reproduces a Talbot photomicrograph of diatoms, given the same date). It's known that photomicrographs were among the photogenic drawings Talbot exhibited at the Royal Institution in London on 25 July 1839; Talbot himself reported that these had included "some images formed by the Solar Microscope, viz. a slice of wood very highly magnified, exhibiting the pores of two kinds, one set much smaller than the other, and more numerous. Another Microscopic sketch, exhibiting the reticulations on the wing of an insect."

Stereoscopic photomicrographs were being taken by 1866, at which date one (above), of the snail Helix costata (by Armand Varroquier), was published in Albert Moitessier's La photographie appliquée aux recherches micrographiques. [Wasielewski]

Micro-cinematography (cinemicrography)

In 1891 Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) employed his newly perfected chronophotographe to photograph infusoria through a microscope. [Tosi]

Electron micrography

The microscope, completed in November 1933, was in fact Ruska's second design, but there don't appear to be any surviving images taken by the first (which had been completed in August of the same year). [Ruska's Nobel lecture, 1986]

3D imagery using a scanning electron microscope was first achieved, by D.J. De Rosier and A. Klug in 1968, by means of combining projections from different angles of tilt using the Fourier transform, a mathematical technique. Initially this only worked with helically symmetrical structures, such as the tail of the T4 bacteriophage, on which it was first employed. [De Rosier & Klug, 3D Electron Microscopy]

On 25 April 2012 a Japanese research group announced that they had developed a scanning electron microscope (SEM) capable of showing a 3D image in real time, with a high-resolution naked-eye 3D monitor for the SEM. [Tech-On]

Astrophotography

John William Draper (1811–1882) succeeded in capturing a daguerreotype image of the moon, probably in late 1839. Although this survives, it is badly flawed with photographic artefacts and other imperfections, and can't be regarded as successful. Successful or not, this is the earliest known astrophotograph, and as such is the one I've chosen for reproduction here.

He later made what is now regarded as the first successful daguerreotype of the moon (a 30-minute exposure), using a 3in lens and a 6in mirror. Draper reported his success to the New York Lyceum of Natural History on 23 March 1840. According to Stefan Hughes, Draper's first successful daguerreotype was destroyed in a fire at New York University in 1865, but a copy survives. [Ré; Hughes, p132, where the copy of the later, successful, image is also reproduced]

[The first stereoscopic astrophotographs, of the Moon, were taken by Warren de la Rue (1815–1889) in 1858/9. The stereoscopic effect was achieved by taking left and right images at different librations, 15 months apart, so is really an artifice.]

Astro-cinematography

Both Canales and Ré include images of the CNAM disc, and an animation was made from it by Joseph Leclerc in 1950 (possibly that now viewable on YouTube). (The Origins of Scientific Cinematography DVD includes an animation of a Janssen disc of the 1874 transit recorded by British astronomers, and a Quicktime animation has been made from glass-plate negatives taken by David P. Todd and his team of the 1882 transit. An animation also appears here but, despite the filename, this is probably not Janssen's disc.)

Radar astronomy

Photo n^o 261209-1D, courtesy of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, Massachusetts

Radio astronomy

Present-day radio-astronomy, and the now familiar high-resolution computerised images, are dependent on what is called very long base interferometry (VLBI), which combines observations from many telescopes, emulating a single telescope of a size comparable to the maximum separation of the constituent telescopes. Although first demonstrated (by Roger Jennison) in 1958, it only became widely used in 1974. So far I have not succeeded in locating early examples of VLBI imagery. The earliest images in the Bordeaux VLBI Image Database date from 1994.