On loan to The Met The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
The Moon, New York
Lewis Morris Rutherfurd American
Not on view
Inspired by Harvard’s Great Refractor, Rutherfurd constructed a fourteen-foot-long telescope in the backyard of his New York home. He quit his successful day job as a lawyer and devoted himself to astrophotography—a field he soon transformed by inventing a new telescopic lens. Because photographic plates are sensitive to a different spectrum of light than the naked eye, astronomers had to focus their instruments by trial and error. In 1864 Rutherfurd solved this problem by devising an achromatic lens specially corrected for the light sensitivity of the photographic plate. By disregarding human sight in favor of the camera’s eye, he managed to produce extraordinarily precise images of the moon, widely celebrated for their beauty.
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