William herschel discovered

The German-born English astronomer Sir William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus, the intrinsic motion of the sun in space, and the form of the Milky Way. His father was a musician in the Hanoverian guard, which William joined at the age of In Herschel went to England. In Yorkshire he conducted a small military band, and from to he was a concert manager in Leeds.

His notebook of has these laconic entries: "Feb. Observation of Venus" and "Feb. Eclipse of the moon at 7 o'clock A. By the end of the year he became organist at the fashionable spa town of Bath. In his sister, Caroline Lucretia Herschel , came to live with him at Bath.

William herschel contribution to astronomy

She collaborated with her brother on astronomical researches. Not until is there another scientific entry in Herschel's notebooks: "April Bought a quadrant and Emerson's Trigonometry. Obsessed with astronomy, Herschel progressed through pasteboard and tin-tubed telescopes to a hired Gregorian reflector. When he tried to buy a much larger reflecting telescope in London, he could find nothing suitable which he could afford.

William herschel family

For this reason he began to build his own. By September he was observing the heavens with a Newtonian reflecting telescope of 6-foot focal length of his own construction. Herschel now entered into a long and tedious period of his life, when he and his brother and sister worked away at grinding and polishing telescope mirrors.