Today in 1850, the first daguerreotype of a star (Vega) was taken by J.A. Whipple working under W.C. Bond, following several years of experiments using smaller telescopes.
Between 1847 and 1852, William Cranch Bond and pioneer photographer John Adams Whipple used the Great Refractor telescope, the largest telescope in the United States at the time, to produce images of the moon that were remarkable in their clarity of detail and aesthetic power. This was the largest telescope in North America at that time, and their images of the moon took the prize for technical excellence in photography at the 1851 Great Exhibition at The Crystal Palace in London.