Happy Birthday, William

Today in 1738 Frederick William Herschel was born (as Friedrich Wilhelm) in Germany. He later moved to England, where he Anglicized his name and worked first as a musician and fairly prolific composer. But music led him to math, and math to astronomy ... and the rest, as they say, was history. Herschel made telescopes for others, and used them for himself. Among his many discoveries are the planet Uranus, which got him an FRS and allowed him to work at astronomy permanently - he and his sister Caroline, a good observer in her own right and a comet specialist, moved to Buckinghamshire, where he built a special building to house his telescope. He discovered two of Saturn's moons (later named Mimas and Enceladus - he just gave them numbers), two of Uranus's (to be named Titania and Oberon), that double stars are indeed binary and not optical illusions, and that the solar system is moving through space. He cataloged nebulae and coined the word 'asteroid'. Oh, he also discovered infrared light while studying optics.

He built a forty-foot telescope (though it was so cumbersome to use that he preferred a 28' one) - this was his biggest, for a time the biggest on Earth, and most famous. "The great light of my forty-foot telescope was so useful that on the 17th of September, 1789, I remarked the seventh satellite, then situated at its greatest western elongation."