William Herschel's Passion For Astronomy

William Herschel didn’t start out his life and career interested in space and the stars. He started as a music teacher and musician. He was in his 30s before he started asking questions and looking at the stars. I think Herschel’s motivation came from wanting to learn more about the world around him and reading. While Herschel was still a musician, he read “Opticks by Robert Smith”1. In the books last few chapters, Smith talked about “Telescopial

Herschel just happened to be studying the stars between 10-11pm. What he did not expect was to find a planet on that fateful night. Herschel thought that what he had spotted was a big star, but then decided that it was a comet. However, he quickly realized that this was no star, it was much more! In this situation, technology made all the difference. Without these high-powered magnifiers, it would have been easily forgotten. Once he formed a hypothesis, how tried to figure out what the planet was not. It was much larger than the other planets. Once he realized that this was an actual planet, he wrote a letter to his colleague about it. This was an exciting discovery for 1787! It was the first planet to be discovered in a more modern

The discovery of Uranus by William Herschel in 1781 was a surprise to the professional astronomers of the day. William was an amateur astronomer and he made his own telescopes. He was looking at the night sky and he was looking at what others had noted was another star. With his better equipment, he could see that it was not a star but a planet. He wanted to name the planet after King George III of England. It was decided that is was going to be named after the Greek gods. It got the name of Uranus who was the father of Saturn according to mythology. It took a few years for that name to stick but when it did, the rest was history. William did get a paid as a professional astronomer after his discovery. That is good advice for all of us: Do

The moons we know today were also discovered by Herschel: Titania and Oberon. After two years, in 1789 William also finished his largest telescope, 48 inches. This telescope made another Saturn’s sixth and sevenths moon; Enceladus and Mimas. Now moving on from the telescope, William tried out a basic experiment determining the temperature of different colors passing through a prism. He began to notice light that was beyond the color red. Higher then light and the visible spectrum. Using measurements and prior knowledge the light he was seeing is what we know today, Infrared radiation. The European Space Agency infrared space observatory was subsequently named for him.

The stars and its behavior have been studied for thousands of years. An astronomer Sir William Herschel made an important discovery for modern times. He used the telescope as a tool to discover the seventh planet of our solar system which was considered before by the astronomers to be a star. Herschel found the planet through the use of 227 power telescope on the western extremity of the constellation Gemini in search of double stars. The planet was discovered on March 13, 1781. Herschel named the planet Georgium Sidus, or the “Georgian Planet,” in honor of King George III of England. The name was later changed by a German astronomer called Johann Bode who proposed the name “Uranus”.

When William Herschel was young boy he had many interests, and one of them was astronomy. He read many books about it. During the day he would work on his music, and at night, he would build telescopes. Eventually he was building the best telescopes in the world, along with his siblings, which enabled him to see further into space.

William Herschel was an astronomer who created the first telescope. He spent nine years surveying the sky and investigating double stars. His discoveries motivated him to create bigger and stronger telescopes. In 1779 Herschel set out to survey all of the stars in heaven down to the eighth magnitude. Using his 7 foot telescope he set out to isolate as many double stars as he could. It was during this research in March of 1781 when he realized that one celestial body he had observed was not a star, but a planet, Uranus. This was the first planet to be discovered since antiquity and Herschel became famous overnight.

Out of all of the discoveries I choose to do my research on the discovery of Uranus by William Herschel in 1781. Uranus was actually the first planet to be discovered since the beginning of the recorded history. Around this time the only planets that was recorded were the 5 that could be seen by the naked eye. William Herschel was a musician who was fascinated by astronomy and study many books about the subject. He was very different from other astronomers because he wasn’t interested in calculating planets orbits or charting down start positions, he enjoyed observing the stars, moons, and Sun. He also believed in extra-terrestrial intelligent life or in other words aliens. In this time period large telescopes weren’t available so Herschel

William Herschel, a famous astronomer, is best known for the discovery of Uranus. For many years Herschel used a telescope that he designed and built himself in order to watch this ball of light. He was sure it was a planet, he just needed to be able to prove it. It wasn’t until 1781 that he finally claimed it to be a planet.

Many scientist used telescopes to look at the planets and turned up the brightness. It helped showing how far the planet was and to show there are planets between the star and earth. Scientist started looking for pulsating stars and using them to find different planets. To find smaller planets scientist used NASA’s Kepler telescope. The telescope was very helpful for NASA and it proved that there are smaller planets. They figured out that some stars have planets. NASA’s help was very successful and they found different planets by the

William Herschel is remembered as a great musician and astronomer of the late 1700’s. He is especially known for his discovery of Uranus in 1781. But with such limited technology, how was he able to make such a discovery? Well Herschel was a builder and seller of telescopes. Building off on Newton’s discovery that in a telescope “different colours, as they [pass] through the objective lens at the upper end of the tube, [are] bent (‘refracted’) by slightly different amounts and… [come] to a focus at slightly different distances from the objective” (Hoskin) creating an unclear, and distorted image. Herschel was able to fix this problem and create a telescope that would create a perfectly clear image. His solution was to “replace the lens [with]

William Herschel discovered the seventh planet from the sun, Uranus. This was the first planet discovered using a telescope. William Herschel started to question if Uranus was a planet or a star while looking at Uranus. From using a telescope, William Herschel was able to tell that Uranus was a planet and not a star. Previous astronomers thought that Uranus was a star and not a planet because they didn’t use a telescope. William Herschel named the planet Georgium Sidus (“Georgian Planet”) after the King of England. There was another astronomer named Johann Bode, who wanted to name the planet “Uranus” after an Olympian god of the heavens. By the 1950’s, the planet’s name was accepted as Uranus. The discovery of Uranus relates to the scientific

After the word of his discovery made its way around, the king granted a salary to Herschel, allowing him to focus only on his astronomy studies and quit his day job. It paved the way for better telescopes which lead to further exploration, and it broke wide open the possibility of more findings, since this was the first discovery of a planet since history began being

William Herschel discovered Uranus in March of 1781. He discovered this threw a telescope. It was the first planet to be discovered using a telescope. Many other scientist that saw this through a telescope thought that Uranus was just a star, but Herschel was able to identify that one of those stars was an actual planet. He was fascinated with the natural philosophy of light and with the behavior of the eyes was the counterpart of this task.

In 1609, Galileo Galilei, using “spyglass” which allowed one to see things closer than they appeared, made an early version of the telescope. With it, he observed the skies in a way no one had before. He discovered the moon isn’t perfectly globular, it has craters, the Sun has sunspots, Venus orbits the Sun (contrary to widespread belief in his time), and then he observed four “stars” around Jupiter (“Our Solar System”). Within