The Herschels and Modern Astronomy

Caroline Lucretia Herschel was born at Hanover, March 16th, 1750, and was thus more than eleven years younger than the brother with whose name hers is inseparably associated. Sh...

Could the whole of Sir John Herschel’s astronomical career be obliterated, and the whole of his contributions to pure mathematics be forgotten, he would still merit celebrity as...

William Herschel was descended from one of three brothers, whose Lutheran opinions made it expedient for them to quit Moravia early in the seventeenth century. Hans Herschel the...

Double stars were, when Herschel began to pay attention to them, regarded as mere chance productions. No suspicion was entertained that a real, physical bond united their compon...

William Herschel was now an appendage to the court of George III. He had to live near Windsor, and a large dilapidated house on Datchet Common was secured as likely to meet his...

“A knowledge of the construction of the heavens,” Herschel wrote in 1811, “has always been the ultimate object of my observations.” The “Construction of the Heavens”! A phrase o...

The voyage was prosperous, but long. Nine weeks and two days passed before the welcome cry of “Land” was heard; and it was in the dawn of January 15, 1835, that Table Mountain a...

“The little boy is entertaining, comical, and promising,” Dr. Burney wrote after his visit to Slough in 1797. John Frederick William Herschel was then five years old, having bee...

Herschel’s career as an observing astronomer came to a virtual end with his departure from the Cape. He was then forty-six, two years younger than his father when he began his c...

The powers of the telescope were so unexpectedly increased, that they may almost be said to have been discovered by William Herschel. No one before him had considered the advant...