Editing Daguerreotype (section)

== Astronomical applications in the 19th century ==
In 1839, [[François Arago]] had in his address to the French Chamber of Deputies outlined a wealth of possible applications including astronomy, and indeed the daguerreotype was still occasionally used for astronomical photography in the 1870s.

The first known photograph of a solar eclipse was taken on July 28, 1851, by [[Julius Berkowski|Johann Julius Friedrich Berkowski]], using the daguerreotype process.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Weitering |first=Hanneke |date=2017-07-28 |title=1st Photo of a Total Solar Eclipse Was Taken 166 Years Ago Today |url=https://www.space.com/37656-first-total-solar-eclipse-photo-ever.html |access-date=2024-04-08 |website=Space.com |language=en}}</ref><ref>{{Cite magazine |last=Farber |first=Madeline |date=2017-08-11 |title=This Is the First-Ever Photo of a Total Solar Eclipse |url=https://time.com/4883424/solar-eclipse-first-photo-taken/ |access-date=2024-04-09 |magazine=TIME |language=en}}</ref>

Although the [[Collodion process|collodion wet plate process]] offered a cheaper and more convenient alternative for commercial portraiture and for other applications with shorter exposure times, when the [[transit of Venus]] was about to occur and observations were to be made from several sites on the earth's surface in order to calculate astronomical distances, daguerreotypy proved a more accurate method of making visual recordings through telescopes because it was a dry process with greater dimensional stability, whereas collodion glass plates were exposed wet and the image would become slightly distorted when the emulsion dried.