Page "Vega" Paragraph 4

Astrophotography, the photography of celestial objects, began in 1840 when John William Draper took an image of the Moon using the daguerreotype process.

On July 17, 1850, Vega became the first star ( other than the Sun ) to be photographed, when it was imaged by William Bond and John Adams Whipple at the Harvard College Observatory, also with a daguerreotype.

Henry Draper took the first photograph of a star's spectrum in August 1872 when he took an image of Vega, and he also became the first person to show absorption lines in the spectrum of a star.

Similar lines had already been identified in the spectrum of the Sun.

In 1879, William Huggins used photographs of the spectra of Vega and similar stars to identify a set of twelve " very strong lines " that were common to this stellar category.

These were later identified as lines from the Hydrogen Balmer series.

Since 1943, the spectrum of this star has served as one of the stable anchor points by which other stars are classified.