New York : Some 400 years of depictions of the Moon, particularly via photography, are going on display at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art ahead of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing.

The Met will unveil its Apollo’s Muse: The Moon In The Age Of Photography on July 3, approximately two weeks before of the five-decade mark since the 1969 space trip that landed the first two people on Earth’s satellite.

Visitors however, are not limited to the recent past. On display will be works dating as far back as 1610, when Galileo etched the giant glowing body in a book of astronomical observations. “The Moon has always been an object of science and art, observation and imagination,” said exhibit curator Mia Fineman, during a press presentation. The Moon has been photographed since the medium’s earliest days, and in 1840 American John William Draper made the first daguerreotype – an early version of the photo using silver-plated copper.“The fascination with the Moon and the development of photography were linked and connected from the very beginning of this particular medium,” said Met director Max Hollein.

Italian astronomer Francesco Fontana created woodcuts showing the Moon and the planets as he saw them through a self-constructed telescope. In 1646, he published most of them in the book Novae Coelestium, Terrestriumque Rerum Observationes, et Fortasse Hactenus Non Vulgatae.