William Herschel

William Herschel was a German born British astronomer and telescope maker who discovered the planet Uranus on 13 March 1781 while surveying the constellation Gemini, the first planet found in the telescopic era, and who discovered infrared radiation in 1800 by measuring temperature just beyond the red end of a sunlit spectrum. Trained first as a musician, he turned to astronomy in the 1770s and built and sold at least sixty complete telescopes, pioneering the compact Herschelian reflector design; he ground and cast well over four hundred mirrors in his own workshop. His discovery of Uranus won him election as a Fellow of the Royal Society and appointment in 1782 as King's Astronomer to George III, funding a move to Slough where he carried out deep sky surveys, cataloguing thousands of nebulae and double stars. He worked throughout with his sister Caroline Herschel, who recorded and reduced his observations and went on to make her own independent discoveries of comets and nebulae, becoming the first woman in England to receive a government salary as an astronomer. In 1820 William Herschel became the first President of the Royal Astronomical Society.