Today in History—January 2: “I have seized the light. I have arrested its flight.”

On this day in 1839 French artist and chemist Louis Daguerre made the first image of the Moon. Probably. No one alive today knows what the image might have looked like, because—unfortunately for Daguerre and the rest of the art-appreciating world—his studio burned down shortly after. History’s first lunar portrait literally went up in smoke.

This was the year Daguerre perfected the earliest practical form of still photography, which he called the daguerreotype (naturally). What better object to practice on than that big, bright, extremely stationary sky subject?

Photography at this point was in its toddler stage: ambitious but still learning to walk. Images had been produced as early as 1826 or 1827 by French inventor Nicéphore Niépce. But these early images—called heliographs, because they relied on sunlight—were faint, unstable, or required hours-long exposure time. And forget trying to capture anything that could move. Niépce’s earliest work featured a pigeon house and a pear tree.

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Daguerre and Niépce were collaborators, so Daguerre was familiar with heliographs—and their limits. The two men strategized over how to create stable, reliable images using light and chemistry. Niépce died in 1833, but his progress paved the way for Daguerre. One legend suggests that Daguerre’s breakthrough was literal: He broke a mercury-filled thermometer, and the vapor enhanced an image. However he happened upon the idea, mercury vapors became central to a process that reduced exposure time to just 20 or 30 minutes. Upon his success, Daguerre is known to have said, “I have seized the light. I have arrested its flight.”

Each daguerreotype was one of a kind, exposed directly onto a copper plate, developed with mercury vapors, finished with a salt solution, and sealed under glass to prevent tarnishing.

Daguerre’s process was presented at a joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris that August. The crowd overflowed the building. To the audience, it must have seemed more like alchemy than science. The first surviving photo of the Moon came a year later. It was taken by John William Draper using Daguerre’s eponymous process.

We’ve come a long way since it took eight hours to photograph a barn. Thankfully, the Moon was kind enough to wait around until science and art caught up enough to capture its surface in all its glory.