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Though he was meticulous about recording technical details such as exposure and film type, American landscape photographer Ansel Adams was somewhat lax about noting exactly when and where he took his pictures. So it’s no small feat that a team of astronomers has accurately dated one of Adams’s acclaimed pictures, proving art historians wrong in the process.

Museums usually date the photograph Autumn Moon, the High Sierra from Glacier Point to 1944. Now Don Olson of Texas State University, San Marcos, and his colleagues have used a combination of lunar tables, maps, weather records and planetarium software to establish…

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