78 Facts About William Herschel

William Herschel frequently collaborated with his younger sister and fellow astronomer Caroline Herschel.

William Herschel published catalogues of nebulae in 1802 and in 1820.

The resolving power of the William Herschel telescopes revealed that many objects called nebulae in the Messier catalogue were actually clusters of stars.

William Herschel was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and grants were provided for the construction of new telescopes.

William Herschel pioneered the use of astronomical spectrophotometry, using prisms and temperature measuring equipment to measure the wavelength distribution of stellar spectra.

William Herschel was made a Knight of the Royal Guelphic Order in 1816.

William Herschel was the first President of the Royal Astronomical Society when it was founded in 1820.

William Herschel died in August 1822, and his work was continued by his only son, John Herschel.

William Herschel was born in the Electorate of Hanover in Germany, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, one of ten children of Isaak William Herschel and his wife, Anna Ilse Moritzen, of German Lutheran ancestry.

Theories that they were Protestants from Bohemia have been questioned by Hamel as the surname William Herschel already occurred a century earlier in the very same area in which the family lived.

William Herschel's father was an oboist in the Hanover Military Band.

William Herschel composed numerous musical works, including 24 symphonies and many concertos, as well as some church music.

William Herschel was head of the Durham Militia band from 1760 to 1761.

William Herschel moved to Sunderland in 1761; Charles Avison engaged him as the first violin and soloist for his Newcastle orchestra, where he played for one season.

William Herschel visited the home of Sir Ralph Milbanke at Halnaby Hall near Darlington in 1760, where he wrote two symphonies, as well as giving performances himself.

In 1766, William Herschel became organist of the Octagon Chapel, Bath, a fashionable chapel in a well-known spa, in which city he was Director of Public Concerts.

In 1780, William Herschel was appointed director of the Bath orchestra, with his sister often appearing as soprano soloist.

William Herschel's reading in natural philosophy during the 1770s not only indicates his personal interests, but suggests an intention to be upwardly mobile, both socially and professionally.

William Herschel was well-positioned to engage with eighteenth-century "philosophical gentlemen" or philomaths, of wide-ranging logical and practical tastes.

William Herschel read James Ferguson's Astronomy explained upon Sir Isaac Newton's principles and made easy to those who have not studied mathematics and William Emerson's The elements of trigonometry, The elements of optics and The principles of mechanics.

William Herschel took lessons from a local mirror-builder and having obtained both tools and a level of expertise, started building his own reflecting telescopes.

William Herschel would spend up to 16 hours a day grinding and polishing the speculum metal primary mirrors.

William Herschel relied on the assistance of other family members, particularly his sister Caroline and his brother Alexander, a skilled mechanical craftsperson.

William Herschel became an active member, and through Watson would greatly enlarge his circle of contacts.

William Herschel soon discovered many more binary and multiple stars than expected, and compiled them with careful measurements of their relative positions in two catalogues presented to the Royal Society in London in 1782 and 1784.

In 1797, William Herschel measured many of the systems again, and discovered changes in their relative positions that could not be attributed to the parallax caused by the Earth's orbit.

William Herschel originally thought it was a comet or a stellar disc, which he believed he might actually resolve.

William Herschel reported the sighting to Nevil Maskelyne the Astronomer Royal.

William Herschel made many more observations of it, and afterwards Russian Academician Anders Lexell computed the orbit and found it to be probably planetary.

William Herschel agreed, determining that it must be a planet beyond the orbit of Saturn.

William Herschel called the new planet the "Georgian star" after King George III, which brought him favour; the name did not stick.

William Herschel achieved an international reputation for their manufacture, profitably selling over 60 completed reflectors to British and Continental astronomers.

From 1782 to 1802, and most intensively from 1783 to 1790, William Herschel conducted systematic surveys in search of "deep-sky" or non-stellar objects with two 20-foot-focal-length, 12-and-18.7-inch-aperture telescopes.

William Herschel published his discoveries as three catalogues: Catalogue of One Thousand New Nebulae and Clusters of Stars, Catalogue of a Second Thousand New Nebulae and Clusters of Stars and the previously cited Catalogue of 500 New Nebulae.

William Herschel arranged his discoveries under eight "classes": bright nebulae, faint nebulae, very faint nebulae, planetary nebulae, very large nebulae, very compressed and rich clusters of stars, compressed clusters of small and large [faint and bright] stars, and coarsely scattered clusters of stars.

William Herschel copied astronomical catalogues and other publications for William.

William Herschel had to run inside and let his eyes readjust to the artificial light before he could record anything, and then he would have to wait until his eyes were adjusted to the dark before he could observe again.

In 1783, William Herschel built her a small Newtonian reflector telescope, with a handle to make a vertical sweep of the sky.

William Herschel found fourteen new nebulae and, at her brother's suggestion, updated and corrected Flamsteed's work detailing the position of stars.

William Herschel was even summoned to Windsor Castle to demonstrate Caroline's comet to the royal family.

Caroline William Herschel was honoured by the Royal Astronomical Society for this work in 1828.

William Herschel's appointment made her the first female in England to be honoured with a government position.

William Herschel lived the rest of his life in this residence, which came to be known as Observatory House.

In later life, Caroline and Lady William Herschel exchanged affectionate letters.

William Herschel worked to verify and confirm his findings as well as putting together catalogues of nebulae.

William Herschel did this so that her nephew, John, could re-examine them systematically.

William Herschel was assisted by his sister Caroline and other family members.

William Herschel is reported to have cast, ground, and polished more than four hundred mirrors for telescopes, varying in size from 6 to 48 inches in diameter.

The largest and most famous of William Herschel's telescopes was a reflecting telescope with a 49.

In 1785 William Herschel approached King George for money to cover the cost of building the 40-foot telescope.

In 1789, shortly after this instrument was operational, William Herschel discovered a new moon of Saturn: Mimas, only 250 miles in diameter.

William Herschel discovered that unfilled telescope apertures can be used to obtain high angular resolution, something which became the essential basis for interferometric imaging in astronomy.

William Herschel was sure that he had found ample evidence of life on the Moon and compared it to the English countryside.

William Herschel did not refrain himself from theorising that the other planets were populated, with a special interest in Mars, which was in line with most of his contemporary scientists.

William Herschel went so far as to speculate that the interior of the Sun was populated.

William Herschel examined the correlation of solar variation and solar cycle and climate.

Over a period of 40 years, William Herschel regularly observed sunspots and their variations in number, form and size.

William Herschel compared his observations with the series of wheat prices published by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.

In 1801, William Herschel reported his findings to the Royal Society and indicated five prolonged periods of few sunspots correlated with the price of wheat.

William Herschel's study was ridiculed by some of his contemporaries but did initiate further attempts to find a correlation.

William Herschel did not give these moons their names; they were named by his son John in 1847 and 1852, respectively, after his death.

William Herschel measured the axial tilt of Mars and discovered that the Martian ice caps, first observed by Giovanni Domenico Cassini and Christiaan Huygens, changed size with that planet's seasons.

William Herschel introduced but did not create the word "asteroid", meaning star-like, in 1802, to describe the star-like appearance of the small moons of the giant planets and of the minor planets; the planets all show discs, by comparison.

William Herschel studied the structure of the Milky Way and was the first to propose a model of the galaxy based on observation and measurement.

William Herschel concluded that it was in the shape of a disk, but incorrectly assumed that the Sun was in the centre of the disk.

In early 1800, William Herschel was testing different filters to pass sunlight through, and noticed that filters of different colors seemed to generate varying amounts of heat.

William Herschel decided to pass the light through a prism to measure the different colors of light using a thermometer, and in the process, took a measurement just beyond the red end of the visible spectrum.

William Herschel detected a temperature one degree higher than that of red light.

William Herschel was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1788.

In 1816, William Herschel was made a Knight of the Royal Guelphic Order by the Prince Regent and was accorded the honorary title 'Sir' although this was not the equivalent of an official British knighthood.

William Herschel helped to found the Astronomical Society of London in 1820, which in 1831 received a royal charter and became the Royal Astronomical Society.

On 25 August 1822, William Herschel died at Observatory House, Windsor Road, Slough, Buckinghamshire, after a long illness.

William Herschel's interests were much more in line with her nephew John Herschel, an astronomer, than with her surviving family in Hanover.

William Herschel continued to work on the organization and cataloguing of nebulae, creating what would later become the basis of the New General Catalogue.

William Herschel lived most of his life in the town of Slough, then in Buckinghamshire.

William Herschel died in the town and was buried under the tower of the nearby St Laurence's Church, Upton-cum-Chalvey.

William Herschel is especially honoured in Slough and there are several memorials to him and his discoveries.

In 2011 a new bus station, the design of which was inspired by the infrared experiment of William Herschel, was built in the centre of Slough.