How lunar photography brought the heavens down to earth

I’ve found myself recently drawn to astronomy — to its models and conjectures, its fuzzy borders. To its millenniums-long marriage of the sciences and the arts. To its photographs, above all. A dozen cameras are strewn, still today, on the lunar surface: abandoned, so Apollo’s astronaut-photographers could lighten their load for the return voyages.

The photos these astronauts produced are astonishing. Also mundane. Some are astonishing because they’re mundane. Images of an alien world that is already familiar. Dust and moondust. And to me they express how art and science, together, in consonance, allow us to reckon with things we haven’t yet seen. Things we don’t understand. Step by step, through models and risks, to new horizons or dead ends.

John Glenn became the first American to take a picture beyond Earth, in 1962 — although, in that early stage of the space race, photography was still just an astronaut’s recreation. Glenn went into orbit with a point-and-shoot Minolta he bought in a Florida drugstore. The very first color photographs from space, to speak only aesthetically, were not so different from the blurry souvenirs we all shoot from the window of a Boeing 767.

Initially, photography in space was discouraged for geopolitical reasons. Snapping selfies in orbit might be seen as an act of Cold War espionage. But through the mid-1960s, as weather satellites and lunar probes beamed back images of our world and others, photography secured its place as a spaceman’s art.

Apollo 13 astronauts Lovell and Fred Haise undertook rigorous testing at the Nevada Test Site and in Hawaiian lava fields. They used custom Hasselblad cameras, functional in extreme temperatures, with extra-large buttons you could push even through a moonsuit glove. Those cameras had no viewfinders. And since they were attached to the spacesuit, the astronauts had to learn to point the cameras with their bodies: picture making as a kind of dance.

The first photograph taken on the surface of the moon was by Neil Armstrong, for Apollo 11 in 1969. A shockingly well-composed picture. The lunar module Eagle’s leg is near dead center. A bag of waste is perfectly jettisoned to one side. During their camera training, it became evident that Armstrong had a better eye than Buzz Aldrin. Which meant he was the one taking most of the pictures during the mission.

Armstrong took more than 100 photographs. I’d happily claim, in fact, that he authored one of the last century’s signal works of American portraiture: his head-on view of Aldrin, legs contrapposto like a Greek statue, in the southwest of the Sea of Tranquility. (In fact, Armstrong is reflected in Aldrin’s gold visor — one of the only still images of Armstrong on the moon.)

Yet perhaps more extraordinary are the photographs from the subsequent mission. Alan Bean and Pete Conrad of Apollo 12 walked on the moon for three times as long as Armstrong and Aldrin had six months earlier — and they took 583 photos. They were charged, specifically, with creating panoramas: 360-degree views that would establish, when pieced together back home, the context of their scientific research. These are history’s most extraordinary worksite documents. But they are also affective pictorial works — by trained photographers — that rumble in the best way the borders of aesthetics and research.

In one-sixth gravity, art and science did not seem so far apart.

For two millenniums before blastoff, astronomy belonged as much to the realms of art, philosophy and religion as it did to what we moderns call science. In Greece, in Rome, in classical Arabia, investigations of planets and stars were no dry matters of numbers and vectors. The movement of heavenly bodies manifested a divine or mathematical order. The proof of that order was its beauty, the elegance of its internal structure.

No celestial body had as much cultural and aesthetic significance as the moon: another world, visible with the naked eye, which structured the calendar and the rites of just about every ancient civilization. In the Renaissance, humanistic scientists brought a new empirical veracity to the study of the heavens. Yet astronomy, even then, did not lose its aesthetic aspect.

Science entwined with art in the early 17th century, when Galileo — Galileo Galilei, an artist! — made historic ink wash drawings of half a dozen moonphases. Like many other Renaissance men, Galileo had been trained in perspectival drawing.

He knew the fundamentals of chiaroscuro: the modulation of lights and darks that let him capture the pocked lunar surface he saw with his new telescope. He relied on those skills as he looked up one night in 1609. His telescope was a powerful tool. But he needed his brush, his hand, to turn sight into observation.

And for Europeans of the early modern era, lunar mapping became both a hard science and a popular pastime. It was something you could do in an observatory, but also at a country party.

Astronomical dreamings also fueled the great image breakthrough of the 19th century.

On the night of March 26, 1840, just a year after Louis Daguerre announced his discovery of a new kind of image making, New York physician John W. Draper produced the first properly successful photograph of our only satellite. It took Draper, from a roof in Greenwich Village, a half-hour to expose the plate — so long that the photographer needed a special apparatus to compensate for Earth’s rotation. The image glistened on the daguerreotype’s metal, etched by the light of the silvery moon.

Photography, from its earliest days, was gripped by a literal lunacy. Astronomers of the mid-19th century experimented with glass negatives, jury-rigged telescopes, gear-triggered shutters. Selenography — the mapping of the moon, or at least its near side — began with Galileo’s brush but became one of the camera arts.

“Even the face of the moon,” wrote the great naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, “leaves her portrait in Daguerre’s mysterious substance.”

Astronomers, both professional and amateur, competed to chart the moon’s surface. Scientific disputes, about the contours of ridges or the depth of plains, could be settled with a new kind of image. And publishers and mass media got in on these earthbound lunar explorations. At home, through a simple stereoscope, you could behold the moon in three dimensions. The heavens came down to earth, through the work of chemicals and lenses.

It certainly wasn’t all passive picture making. Well-funded scientists and common cranks also turned to photography to imagine what they could not yet observe.

By 1969, the province of dreams could be photographed in situ. When the astronauts of Apollo 12 touched down in the Ocean of Storms, on Nov. 19, 1969, they had already taken canisters’ worth of pictures from the spacecraft. Pete Conrad climbed out first, becoming the third man to walk on the moon, with a sudden jump to the surface. (“Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me.”)

On their two extravehicular excursions Conrad and Bean shot on 70 mm, both in black-and-white and in color. In the light of the lunar dawn, they filled their Hasselblads’ magazines with landscapes, action shots — and the odd accidental photo of their boots. On all of their pictures, by the way, you see a 5-by-5 overlay of crosshairs, which allowed NASA to determine angular distances and notice distortions. Those crosshairs would be essential, back on Earth, for the later construction of the panoramas.

Working in low gravity, adjusting the aperture to account for the low angle of the sun, the two Americans made images with all the scientific romance of those earlier, earthbound moongazers. The photographs were in fact so good — and the 70 mm stock so detailed — that doubts set in on the blue sphere below. With their rich chiaroscuro and starless skies, Bean and Conrad’s photos looked uncannily like a Hollywood stage set.

The Apollo photographers had tapped into a centuries-long desire to picture the moon in as much detail as possible. But the pictures had eroded something too. The moon and its mystique had entered the realm of earthly facts.

“Because of what you have done,” said President Richard Nixon to Armstrong on history’s longest-distance call, “the heavens have become a part of man’s world.” Hardly wrong. The moon would never again be undiscovered country.

I was no childhood space geek. My eyes turned skyward later — through the history of cameras and pictures, and the centuries of lunar art that climaxed with Apollo.

When Georges Méliès shot “A Trip to the Moon” in 1902, motion pictures were not a decade old. But the cinema, like still photography, was born lunaticus: moonstruck. Through splice cuts and pyrotechnics, Méliès transported a new media audience to a lunarian kingdom, with our own planet comfortably in view. It was the first true science-fiction movie. Still the best one, if you ask me. The moon, as always, was earthlings’ favorite soundstage for fantasias.

In our night visions the spaceship was “an engine of sublime elevation” — that was what Daniel Defoe called it, in his own science fiction of 1705. It was going to blast us out of this world, to a “Place of strange Perfection.” A place of strange perfection. Apollo’s astrophotographers found nothing less. And yet how quickly the moon receded into our aggregate knowledge, another corner of the known world.

From the dawn of history to 1969, the moon reflected Earth’s dreams as much as the sun’s rays. Did the camera bring that to an end? Was the moon emptier, drier, than the artists and poets had prepared us for?

Maybe something smaller can still be sublime. A drawing — by Vija Celmins, one of my favorite living artists — shows the surface of the moon. Actually, it’s not that. Not quite. This little work, from 1969, is a drawing of a photograph of the surface of the moon — down to the alignment crosses on the Apollo astronauts’ Hasselblads. The view’s nothing special. It’s just a random corner of a crater. But every lifeless pebble, every bump and abscess, has been lavished with attention.

No need for fantasies, or science fiction. Time, care, skill, practice: These were enough for Celmins to make the moon astonishing again.

Apollo ended in 1972. For a while it seemed no (human) photographer would ever again take pictures on the lunar surface, though now a second space race is on, between China’s brisk Chang’e project and NASA’s wheezing public-private partnership. But there is more than one way to reach the moon. It is less a matter of technology than a way of knowing, a way of attending. Of observing, as painters and astronomers both do, and refining your perceptions and models as you go.

You study. You experiment. You try things out, you try again. That is enough to establish a nexus of possibility. The reason I’ve grown so attached to astrophotography, as I flick on my phone past a thousand images an hour (many now made with no lens but by generative algorithm), is precisely that sufficiency. Compared with alpine vistas, seas that actually have water, the lunar surface cannot really be called dramatic. But the promise of human knowledge is to reach somewhere much more sublime than mountains and oceans.

The artist and the astronaut. Galileo from his campanile and Armstrong from his lunar module. Through eyes and instruments, in the studio and in orbit, we discover our full entanglement with a world we once called other. It is the same enterprise. Art and science both draw in light — photo-, light, -graph, drawing — what usually lies in darkness. They provide the image of things once unknown. You just have to pay attention.

It is all there, already, in the flow of facts and feelings, thrusters and lenses.