Technological question--spin-off's from astronmomyu

If astronomy becomes a high priority in 1876, there are bound to be technologies that advance faster than in OTL. I’m assuming both more academic interest and some government subsidy, above and beyond OTL’s government interest. (In OTL, the US Naval Observatory had the world’s largest telescope at the time.) I’m working on a timeline where, due to an asteroid impact, there is a strong desire to find loose rocks in space; they don’t know just how difficult it will be. But enough will be found to stimulate development in the technologies to find them, and calculate their orbits. In particular, the United States will be spending money to push these techniques.

Some that I see improving faster than OTL:

Photography, to documents observations, and to see fainter objects. (Natural spin-off’s to certain aspects of chemistry…)

Once photography with significant time exposures becomes a significant part of astronomy, machines of sufficient precision AND SIZE to keep a large telescope pointed at a specific part of the sky as the earth turns underneath it, so the images are points rather than arcs. Precision machines of that size will have military applications with regards to accurate gun laying.

Flight: Not so much, as access to space is clearly a pipe dream in 1876. (Won’t stop crackpots from trying…)

Mathematics seems to need little further development for the calculations needed, although faster computations to more decimal places than even a large slide rule can accomplish might be nice.

Any thoughts on elaborating these spin-offs, or any thoughts on any others? Of course, anything that CAN be weaponized, WILL be weaponized...
 
Once photography with significant time exposures becomes a significant part of astronomy, machines of sufficient precision AND SIZE to keep a large telescope pointed at a specific part of the sky as the earth turns underneath it, so the images are points rather than arcs. Precision machines of that size will have military applications with regards to accurate gun laying.
"Clock drives" already existed. It's not just photography that benefits from stable observations, but any kind of observation, so this had been a focus of effort for some time. I would wager that most professional (and probably most amateur) telescopes in the 1870s could track objects if so desired.

Photography wouldn't actually be affected that much, either; by the 1840s and 1850s people were routinely taking pictures of bright objects, and by the 1880s it was becoming a serious research tool due to the introduction of the dry-plate process (in 1876, coincidentally). Your PoD is too late to actually have much direct technological effect, as opposed to spurring more interest in asteroids (which were usually considered nuisances among astronomers of the time), and maybe changing some priorities later on.
 

Driftless

Donor
Flight: Not so much, as access to space is clearly a pipe dream in 1876. (Won’t stop crackpots from trying…)

There were several functional airplane experiments with steam powerplants in the mid-nineteenth century, with scientists & engineers driving the projects. The size and weight of the power plants was a problem - but Henson, Stringfellow, Mozhaisky, Ader, Maxim, Langley, and maybe Whitehead got closer than many realize. The other problem that really didn't get practically resolved till the Wright brother's was the directional control (up/down - right/left) of the aircraft. The Wrights sorted it out by calculations supported by observations in their homebuilt wind tunnel.

You needed both parts: power and control to achieve heavier-than-air flight. If you were able to combine the better powerplant research with the better flight control work, you might see controlled, heavier-than-air flight decades earlier than OTL.
 
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