Note 6 — Chapter VI · THE GENERAL ASPECT OF THE LUNAR SURFACE.

The libratory movement has been taken advantage of, at the suggestion of Sir Chas. Wheatstone, for producing stereoscopic photographs of the moon. In the early days of stereoscopic photography the object to be photographed was placed upon a kind of turn-table, and, after a picture had been taken of it in one position, the table was turned through a small angle for the taking of the second picture; the two placed side by side then represented the object as it would have been seen by two eyes widely separated, or whose visual rays inclined at an angle equal to that through which the table was turned; and when the pictures were viewed through a stereoscope, they combined to produce the wonderful effect of solidity now familiar to every one. The moon, by its librations, imitates the turn-table movement; and, from a large number of photographs of her, taken at different points of her orbit and at different seasons of the year, it is possible to select two which, while they exhibit the same phase of illumination, at the same time present the requisite difference in the points of view from which they are taken to give the effect of stereoscopicity when viewed binocularly. Mr. De la Rue, the father of celestial photography, has been enabled to produce several such pairs of pictures from the vast collection of lunar photographs that he has accumulated. Any one of these pairs of portraits, when stereoscopically combined, reproduces, to quote the words of Sir John Herschel, “the spherical form just as a giant might see it whose stature were such that the interval between his eyes should equal the distance between the place where the earth stood when one view was taken, and that to which it would have to be removed (our moon being fixed) to get the other. Nothing can surpass the impression of real corporeal form thus conveyed by some of these pictures as taken by Mr. De la Rue with his powerful reflector, the production of which (as a step in some sort taken by man outside of the planet he inhabits) is one of the most remarkable and unexpected triumphs of scientific art.”