Melkweg before 1897

This is an image of the Pleiades star cluster, found in a book by Julius Scheiner, an astronomer working in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. The image is a photograph of a photographic plate. Scheiner was committed to what he thought of as the disinterested scientific method, but we should keep in mind that he was working at a time when the distinction between scientific images and other kinds of images wasn't yet firmly established. Astronomy was popular, and the camera had already begun to democratize knowledge. Making images of outer space available to the general public, not just the scientific community, was itself a progressive act. To find out more, it would be useful to look at the institutional history of the observatory where Scheiner worked, and also at the history of popular science publishing during the German Empire.