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 Great Refractor
G. W. Pach American, born Germany
Not on view
In 1847 William Cranch Bond, the first director of Harvard College Observatory, purchased a telescope more than twenty-two feet long with a fifteen-inch-diameter lens, known as the Great Refractor. In addition to photographing the moon, Bond and his photographic partner John Adams Whipple used the instrument to produce the first daguerreotype of a star (Vega) and the first of Jupiter showing its equatorial belts.
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