In 1882, astronomer David Peck Todd shot 147 consecutive plates of the transit of Venus across the sky. Now, two modern astronomers at the Lick Observatory have scanned them and turned them into a Quicktime movie — a film "shot" years before Edison made his first moving picture. This makes me wonder if we'll be able to pull off neat tricks like improvising stereoscopic, moving, and/or panoramic images of the present at some time in the future, say by pulling thousands of moblogged images of a single event off the net and using software to interpolate and assemble them.
Spurred by a reference in one of Todd's letters in Lick's Mary Lea Shane Archives, Bill Sheehan and I found all 147 negatives, still in good condition, at the observatory. To our knowledge, this collection of photos constitutes the most complete surviving record of a historical transit of Venus.
As we looked at Todd's extensive sequence of images, we realized we could turn them into a movie. A similar thought may have occurred to Todd himself, for a number of his contemporaries were already making the first forays into chronophotography — the recording of sequential motion and the forerunner of cinematography. Indeed, Pierre Jules Janssen invented his famous photographic revolver to capture the 1874 transit of Venus.
(via /.)
Update: The Slashdot discussion points to even older examples of this, like animations of Galileo's 1613 sunspot drawings, not to mention this 1865 QTVR (Thanks, Ardes!).
