[2] In 1839, the Harvard Corporation voted to appoint William Cranch Bond, a prominent Boston clockmaker, as "Astronomical Observer to the University" (at no salary).

[4] Between 1847 and 1852, Bond and pioneer photographer John Adams Whipple used the Great Refractor telescope to produce images of the moon that are remarkable in their clarity of detail and aesthetic power.

This was the largest telescope in North America at that time, and their images of the moon took the prize for technical excellence in photography at the 1851 Great Exhibition at The Crystal Palace in London.

Harvard College Observatory is historically important to astronomy, as many women including Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Williamina Fleming, and Florence Cushman performed pivotal stellar classification research.

Cannon, Leavitt and Cushman were hired initially as "computers" to perform calculations and examine stellar photographs, but later made insightful connections in their research.