Scientists studying the aurora borealis – the “northern lights” – were generally having a hard time before the ability to photograph them. The lights were too dim to be caught on early photographic equipment, and long exposure times washed out the images to the point of rendering them useless. It took a German physicist using a colleague’s camera previously used to photograph clouds, to obtain the first ever useful auroral photograph.

On this day, January 5th, in 1892, the first successful black-and-white auroral images was obtained by Martin Brendel and a fellow scientist on an expedition in northern Norway. Both men considered their breakthrough more a proof of concept than anything scientifically valuable, and the pictures remained in near obscurity until their publication in 1900.

Brendel’s method of auroral photography quickly became the standard, greatly speeding up research by allowing scientists to objectively record and compare the lights over distances and times. Despite his belief that the breakthrough meant nothing in the short term, Brendel nearly revolutionized the study of the northern lights.