No, not another Janet Jackson reference.
Nor a Simpson at night.
It’s Venus from 1882.
Slashdot mentions a fascinating story about what might arguably be called the first movie. On December 6 1882, astronomer David Peck Todd created 147 glass plate photographs of the transit of Venus across the face of the Sun. “Fast-forward 120 years,” reads the article at the Sky & Telescope website, as Bill Sheehan and Anthony Misch convert these glass plates into QuickTime, animating at last the images Todd created. [Link to large form movie (4 MB). / Link to small form movie (1.2 MB).]“The result, which premiered at the International Astronomical Union’s general assembly in Sydney in July 2003, shows Venus’s silhouette flickering strangely as it marches across the Sun’s face. It’s the shadow-show of an astronomical event that occurred when Queen Victoria sat on the throne of Great Britain and Chester Arthur was president of the United States a moving record of an event seen by no one now living, and a preview of what millions will see for the first time on June 8, 2004.”
Emir of Bukhara (1911)
Slashdot’s comments point to the work of another forward thinking mind: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, “photographer of the Tsar”, who in the early 1900s had, according to the Library of Congress, “developed an ingenious photographic technique [for] images to be captured in black and white on glass plate negatives, using red, green and blue filters. He then presented these images in color in slide lectures using a light-projection system involving the same three filters.” These amazing full-color photographs vividly capture his world at that time.
