On certain days you regret not having found a memorable Italian date of innovation to celebrate (if you have one, write to me at [email protected]). Also because you thought you had found it, the latest episode of the Mister Fantasy TV program by that master of Carlo Massarini who years earlier with Mediamente had made the very first fans of our local network dream. Wikipedia says that the last episode was on July 17, 1984.
So you call Carlo and he says: impossible, first of all because all Rai programs end in June, and then that last episode I remember very well, it was the evening of the Champions Cup final that Roma lost to Liverpool. I remember it because we were live and I started the program complaining about the result. End of remembrance.
Wikipedia also happens to be wrong (someone correct the wrong entry though). There is no doubt instead of another 17 July, many years earlier, 1850, when we, as humanity, took the first photo of a star (apart from the Sun of course). The photo was taken with a twenty-minute exposure from the Harvard Observatory, where there was the most powerful American telescope. It was taken by photographer John Adams Whipple and Observatory director William Bond. The star was Vega, in the constellation of Libra. The result was a daguerreotype that has not yet been digitized. That photo marks the beginning of astrophotography.
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