Maroon cloth binding with gilt title and decoration on the spine.

• F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

•        Note: This book carries the £5.00 discount to those that subscribe to the F.B.A. mailing list.

Tipped-in albumen-print frontispiece and 2 further albumen-prints of the moon, all by Rutherfurd (“enlarged by Brothers”), 22 plates of which 21 numbered I-XVIII and XX-XXII (including 2 large folding lunar maps and 3 Woodbury Types) and 1 unnumbered folding lunar map after Schmidt, 1 illustration Of special interest are the 3 photographic albumen prints of the Moon by Lewis Morris Rutherfurd (1816-1892). “One solution to the problem of reproducing photographs for publication was simply to make positive paper prints and paste them into books. This was expensive, time-consuming, and not always aesthetically pleasing, but it solved the difficulty of capturing tone in a black-and-white medium. Richard Proctor, the greatest popularizer of astronomy in the nineteenth century, used this expedient in his treatise on the moon. In addition to numerous lithographs and wood engravings, and a large folding lunar map by T.W. Webb, there are three photographic prints of the moon by the American Lewis Rutherfurd, whom Proctor called the greatest lunar photographer of the age.” (Ashworth, 19).

Richard Anthony Proctor (23 March 1837 – 12 September 1888) was an English astronomer. He is best remembered for having produced one of the earliest maps of Mars in 1867 from 27 drawings by the English observer William Rutter Dawes. His map was later superseded by those of Giovanni Schiaparelli and Eugène Antoniadi and his nomenclature was dropped (for instance, his “Kaiser Sea” became Syrtis Major Planum).

He used old drawings of Mars dating back to 1666 to try to determine the sidereal day of Mars. His final estimate, in 1873, was 24h 37m 22.713s, very close to the modern value of 24h 37m 22.663s.

The crater Proctor on Mars is named after him.

Lewis Morris Rutherfurd (November 25, 1816 – May 30, 1892) was an American lawyer and astronomer, and a pioneering astrophotographer. Rutherfurd was born in Morrisania, New York, to Robert Walter Rutherfurd (1788–1852) and Sabina Morris (1789–1857) of Morrisania. He was the grandson of John Rutherfurd, U.S. Senator from 1791 to 1798, and great-grandson of Lewis Morris, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Major General William Alexander, the Earl of Stirling, was the uncle of his grandfather. He graduated from Williams College, Massachusetts, in 1834.