January 2: First Photograph of the Moon

The American photographer John Adams Whipple took this daguerreotype of the Moon in 1851.

French pioneering photographer Louis Daguerre took the first photograph of the Moon in 1839. Neither Daguerre's microscopic nor his telescopic daguerreotypes survive, for on March 8, 1839, the Diorama—and with it Daguerre's laboratory—burned to the ground, destroying the inventor's written records and the bulk of his early experimental works.