William Herschel Further discoveries What is one astronomy discovery that was found by William Herschel? Herschel discovered two moons of Saturn, Mimas and Enceladus; Did he teach at a university? I don't know. Did he work with any other astronomers? I don't know. What other discoveries did William Herschel find? two moons of Uranus, Titania and Oberon. He did not give these moons their names; they were named by his son John in 1847
Do we know what methods he used to find the two moons of Uranus, Titania, or Oberon?
Do we know what methods William Herschel used to find the two moons of Uranus, Titania, or Oberon?
In his later career, Herschel discovered two moons of Saturn, Mimas and Enceladus; as well as two moons of Uranus, Titania and Oberon. He did not give these moons their names; they were named by his son John in 1847 and 1852, respectively, after his death. Herschel measured the axial tilt of Mars and discovered that the martian ice caps, first observed by Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1666) and Christiaan Huygens (1672), changed size with that planet's seasons. It has been suggested that Herschel might have discovered rings around Uranus. Herschel introduced but did not create the word "asteroid", meaning star-like (from the Greek asteroeides, aster "star" + -eidos "form, shape"), in 1802 (shortly after Olbers discovered the second minor planet, 2 Pallas, in late March), to describe the star-like appearance of the small moons of the giant planets and of the minor planets; the planets all show discs, by comparison. By the 1850s 'asteroid' became a standard term for describing certain minor planets. From studying the proper motion of stars, the nature and extent of the solar motion was first demonstrated by Herschel in 1783, along with first determining the direction for the solar apex to Lambda Herculis, only 10deg away from today's accepted position. He also studied the structure of the Milky Way and concluded that it was in the shape of a disk. He incorrectly assumed the sun was in the centre of the disc, a theory known as Galactocentrism, which was eventually corrected by the findings of Harlow Shapley in 1918. CANNOTANSWER
CANNOTANSWER
Frederick William Herschel  (; ; 15 November 1738 – 25 August 1822) was a German-born British astronomer and composer. He frequently collaborated with his younger sister and fellow astronomer Caroline Lucretia Herschel (1750–1848). Born in the Electorate of Hanover, William Herschel followed his father into the military band of Hanover, before emigrating to Great Britain in 1757 at the age of nineteen.

Herschel constructed his first large telescope in 1774, after which he spent nine years carrying out sky surveys to investigate double stars. Herschel published catalogues of nebulae in 1802 (2,500 objects) and in 1820 (5,000 objects). The resolving power of the Herschel telescopes revealed that many objects called nebulae in the Messier catalogue were actually clusters of stars. On 13 March 1781 while making observations he made note of a new object in the constellation of Gemini. This would, after several weeks of verification and consultation with other astronomers, be confirmed to be a new planet, eventually given the name of Uranus. This was the first planet to be discovered since antiquity, and Herschel became famous overnight. As a result of this discovery, George III appointed him Court Astronomer. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society and grants were provided for the construction of new telescopes.

Herschel pioneered the use of astronomical spectrophotometry, using prisms and temperature measuring equipment to measure the wavelength distribution of stellar spectra. In the course of these investigations, Herschel discovered infrared radiation.
Other work included an improved determination of the rotation period of Mars, the discovery that the Martian polar caps vary seasonally, the discovery of Titania and Oberon (moons of Uranus) and Enceladus and Mimas (moons of Saturn). Herschel was made a Knight of the Royal Guelphic Order in 1816. He was the first President of the Royal Astronomical Society when it was founded in 1820. He died in August 1822, and his work was continued by his only son, John Herschel.

Early life and musical activities
Herschel was born in the Electorate of Hanover in Germany, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, one of ten children of Issak Herschel and his wife Anna Ilse Moritzen, of German Lutheran ancestry.
His forefathers came from Pirna, in Saxony. Theories that they were Protestants from Bohemia have been questioned by Hamel, since the surname Herschel already occurs a century earlier in the very same area that the family lived in.

Herschel's father was an oboist in the Hanover Military Band. In 1755 the Hanoverian Guards regiment, in whose band Wilhelm and his brother Jakob were engaged as oboists, was ordered to England. At the time the crowns of Great Britain and Hanover were united under King George II. As the threat of war with France loomed, the Hanoverian Guards were recalled from England to defend Hanover. After they were defeated at the Battle of Hastenbeck, Herschel's father Isaak sent his two sons to seek refuge in England in late 1757. Although his older brother Jakob had received his dismissal from the Hanoverian Guards, Wilhelm was accused of desertion (for which he was pardoned by George III in 1782).

Wilhelm, nineteen years old at this time, was a quick student of the English language. In England he went by the English rendition of his name, Frederick William Herschel.

In addition to the oboe, he played the violin and harpsichord and later the organ. He composed numerous musical works, including 24 symphonies and many concertos, as well as some church music. Six of his symphonies were recorded in April 2002 by the London Mozart Players, conducted by Matthias Bamert (Chandos 10048).

Herschel moved to Sunderland in 1761 when Charles Avison engaged him as first violin and soloist for his Newcastle orchestra, where he played for one season. In "Sunderland in the County of Durh: apprill  20th 1761" he wrote his Symphony No. 8 in C Minor. He was head of the Durham Militia band from 1760 to 1761. He visited the home of Sir Ralph Milbanke at Halnaby Hall near Darlington in 1760, where he wrote two symphonies, as well as giving performances himself.
After Newcastle, he moved to Leeds and Halifax where he was the first organist at St John the Baptist church (now Halifax Minster).

In 1766, Herschel became organist of the Octagon Chapel, Bath, a fashionable chapel in a well-known spa, in which city he was also Director of Public Concerts. He was appointed as the organist in 1766 and gave his introductory concert on 1 January 1767. As the organ was still incomplete, he showed off his versatility by performing his own compositions including a violin concerto, an oboe concerto and a harpsichord sonata. On 4 October 1767, he performed on the organ for the official opening of the Octagon Chapel.

His sister Caroline arrived in England on 24 August 1772 to live with William in New King Street, Bath. The house they shared is now the location of the Herschel Museum of Astronomy. Herschel's brothers Dietrich, Alexander and Jakob (1734–1792) also appeared as musicians of Bath. In 1780, Herschel was appointed director of the Bath orchestra, with his sister often appearing as soprano soloist.

Astronomy

Herschel's reading in natural philosophy during the 1770s indicates his personal interests but also suggests an intention to be upwardly mobile socially and professionally. He was well-positioned to engage with eighteenth-century "philosophical Gentleman" or philomaths, of wide-ranging logical and practical tastes.
Herschel's intellectual curiosity and interest in music eventually led him to astronomy. After reading Robert Smith's Harmonics, or the Philosophy of Musical Sounds (1749), he took up Smith's A Compleat System of Opticks (1738), which described techniques of telescope construction. He also read James Ferguson's Astronomy explained upon Sir Isaac Newton's principles and made easy to those who have not studied mathematics (1756) and William Emerson's The elements of trigonometry (1749), The elements of optics (1768) and The principles of mechanics (1754).

Herschel took lessons from a local mirror-builder and having obtained both tools and a level of expertise, started building his own reflecting telescopes. He would spend up to 16 hours a day grinding and polishing the speculum metal primary mirrors. He relied on the assistance of other family members, particularly his sister Caroline and his brother Alexander, a skilled mechanical craftsperson.

He "began to look at the planets and the stars" in May 1773 and on 1 March 1774 began an astronomical journal by noting his observations of Saturn's rings and the Great Orion Nebula (M42).
The English Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne visited the Herschels while they were at Walcot (which they left on 29 September 1777).
By 1779, Herschel had also made the acquaintance of Sir William Watson, who invited him to join the Bath Philosophical Society. Herschel became an active member, and through Watson would greatly enlarge his circle of contacts. A few years later, in 1785, Herschel was elected an international member of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.

Double stars
Herschel's early observational work soon focused on the search for pairs of stars that were very close together visually. Astronomers of the era expected that changes over time in the apparent separation and relative location of these stars would provide evidence for both the proper motion of stars and, by means of parallax shifts in their separation, for the distance of stars from the Earth. The latter was a method first suggested by Galileo Galilei.
From the back garden of his house in New King Street, Bath, and using a ,  (f/13) Newtonian telescope "with a most capital speculum" of his own manufacture, in October 1779, Herschel began a systematic search for such stars among "every star in the Heavens", with new discoveries listed through 1792. He soon discovered many more binary and multiple stars than expected, and compiled them with careful measurements of their relative positions in two catalogues presented to the Royal Society in London in 1782 (269 double or multiple systems) and 1784 (434 systems). A third catalogue of discoveries made after 1783 was published in 1821 (145 systems).

The Rev. John Michell of Thornhill published work in 1767 on the distribution of double stars, and in 1783 on "dark stars", that may have influenced Herschel. After Michell's death in 1793, Herschel bought a ten-foot-long, 30-inch reflecting telescope from Michell's estate.

In 1797, Herschel measured many of the systems again, and discovered changes in their relative positions that could not be attributed to the parallax caused by the Earth's orbit. He waited until 1802 (in Catalogue of 500 new Nebulae, nebulous Stars, planetary Nebulae, and Clusters of Stars; with Remarks on the Construction of the Heavens) to announce the hypothesis that the two stars might be "binary sidereal systems" orbiting under mutual gravitational attraction, a hypothesis he confirmed in 1803 in his Account of the Changes that have happened, during the last Twenty-five Years, in the relative Situation of Double-stars; with an Investigation of the Cause to which they are owing. In all, Herschel discovered over 800 confirmed double or multiple star systems, almost all of them physical rather than optical pairs. His theoretical and observational work provided the foundation for modern binary star astronomy; new catalogues adding to his work were not published until after 1820 by Friedrich Wilhelm Struve, James South and John Herschel.

Uranus

In March 1781, during his search for double stars, Herschel noticed an object appearing as a disk. Herschel originally thought it was a comet or a stellar disc, which he believed he might actually resolve. He reported the sighting to Nevil Maskelyne the Astronomer Royal. He made many more observations of it, and afterwards Russian Academician Anders Lexell computed the orbit and found it to be probably planetary.

Herschel agreed, determining that it must be a planet beyond the orbit of Saturn. He called the new planet the "Georgian star" (Georgium sidus) after King George III, which also brought him favour; the name did not stick. In France, where reference to the British king was to be avoided if possible, the planet was known as "Herschel" until the name "Uranus" was universally adopted. The same year, Herschel was awarded the Copley Medal and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1782, he was appointed "The King's Astronomer" (not to be confused with the Astronomer Royal).

On 1 August 1782 Herschel and his sister Caroline moved to Datchet (then in Buckinghamshire but now in Berkshire). There, he continued his work as an astronomer and telescope maker. He achieved an international reputation for their manufacture, profitably selling over 60 completed reflectors to British and Continental astronomers.

Deep sky surveys

From 1782 to 1802, and most intensively from 1783 to 1790, Herschel conducted systematic surveys in search of "deep-sky" or non-stellar objects with two ,  and  telescopes (in combination with his favoured 6-inch-aperture instrument). Excluding duplicated and "lost" entries, Herschel ultimately discovered over 2,400 objects defined by him as nebulae. (At that time, nebula was the generic term for any visually diffuse astronomical object, including galaxies beyond the Milky Way, until galaxies were confirmed as extragalactic systems by Edwin Hubble in 1924.)

Herschel published his discoveries as three catalogues: Catalogue of One Thousand New Nebulae and Clusters of Stars (1786), Catalogue of a Second Thousand New Nebulae and Clusters of Stars (1789) and the previously cited Catalogue of 500 New Nebulae ... (1802). He arranged his discoveries under eight "classes": (I) bright nebulae, (II) faint nebulae, (III) very faint nebulae, (IV) planetary nebulae, (V) very large nebulae, (VI) very compressed and rich clusters of stars, (VII) compressed clusters of small and large [faint and bright] stars, and (VIII) coarsely scattered clusters of stars. Herschel's discoveries were supplemented by those of Caroline Herschel (11 objects) and his son John Herschel (1754 objects) and published by him as General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters in 1864. This catalogue was later edited by John Dreyer, supplemented with discoveries by many other 19th-century astronomers, and published in 1888 as the New General Catalogue (abbreviated NGC) of 7,840 deep-sky objects. The NGC numbering is still the most commonly used identifying label for these celestial landmarks.

He discovered NGC 12, NGC 13, NGC 14, NGC 16, NGC 23, NGC 24, NGC 7457 (work in progress).

Works with his sister Caroline

Following the death of their father, William suggested that Caroline join him in Bath, England. In 1772, Caroline was first introduced to astronomy by her brother.

Caroline spent many hours polishing the mirrors of high performance telescopes so that the amount of light captured was maximized. She also copied astronomical catalogues and other publications for William. After William accepted the office of King's Astronomer to George III, Caroline became his constant assistant.

In October 1783, a new 20-foot telescope came into service for William. During this time, William was attempting to observe and then record all of the observations. He had to run inside and let his eyes readjust to the artificial light before he could record anything, and then he would have to wait until his eyes were adjusted to the dark before he could observe again. Caroline became his recorder by sitting at a desk near an open window. William would shout out his observations and she would write them down along with any information he needed from a reference book.

Caroline began to make astronomical discoveries in her own right, particularly comets. In 1783, William built her a small Newtonian reflector telescope, with a handle to make a vertical sweep of the sky. Between 1783 and 1787, she made an independent discovery of M110 (NGC 205), which is the second companion of the Andromeda Galaxy. During the years 1786–1797, she discovered or observed eight comets.
She found fourteen new nebulae and, at her brother's suggestion, updated and corrected Flamsteed's work detailing the position of stars. She also rediscovered Comet Encke in 1795.

Caroline Herschel's eight comets were published between 28 August 1782 to 5 February 1787. Five of her comets were published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. William was even summoned to Windsor Castle to demonstrate Caroline's comet to the royal family. William recorded this phenomenon himself, terming it "My Sister's Comet." She wrote letters to the Astronomer Royal to announce the discovery of her second comet, and wrote to Joseph Banks upon the discovery of her third and fourth comets.

The Catalogue of stars taken from Mr Flamsteed's observations contained an index of more than 560 stars that had not been previously included. Caroline Herschel was honoured by the Royal Astronomical Society for this work in 1828.

Caroline also continued to serve as William Herschel's assistant, often taking notes while he observed at the telescope.
For her work as William's assistant, she was granted an annual salary of £50 by George III. Her appointment made her the first female in England to be honoured with a government position. It also made her the first woman to be given a salary as an astronomer.

In June 1785, owing to damp conditions, William and Caroline moved to Clay Hall in Old Windsor. On 3 April 1786, the Herschels moved to a new residence on Windsor Road in Slough. Herschel lived the rest of his life in this residence, which came to be known as Observatory House. It was demolished in 1963.

William Herschel's marriage in 1788 caused a lot of tension in the brother-sister relationship. Caroline has been referred to as a bitter, jealous woman who worshipped her brother and resented her sister-in-law for invading her domestic life. With the arrival of Mary, Caroline lost her managerial and social responsibilities in the household, and with them much of her status. Caroline destroyed her journals between the years 1788 to 1798, so her feelings during this period are not entirely known. According to her memoir, Caroline then moved to separate lodgings, but continued to work as her brother's assistant. When her brother and his family were away from their home, she would often return to take care of it for them. In later life, Caroline and Lady Herschel exchanged affectionate letters.

Caroline continued her astronomical work after William's death in 1822. She worked to verify and confirm his findings as well as putting together catalogues of nebulae. Towards the end of her life, she arranged two-and-a-half thousand nebulae and star clusters into zones of similar polar distances. She did this so that her nephew, John, could re-examine them systematically. Eventually, this list was enlarged and renamed the New General Catalogue. In 1828, she was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society for her work.

Herschel's telescopes
The most common type of telescope at that time was the refracting telescope, which involved the refraction of light through a tube using a convex glass lens.
This design was subject to chromatic aberration, a distortion of an image due to the failure of light of different component wavelengths to converge. Optician John Dollond (1706–1761) tried to correct for this distortion by combining two separate lenses, but it was still difficult to achieve good resolution for far distant light sources.

Reflector telescopes, invented by Isaac Newton in 1668, used a single concave mirror rather than a convex lens. This avoids chromatic aberration. The concave mirror gathered more light than a lens, reflecting it onto a flat mirror at the end of the telescope for viewing. A smaller mirror could provide greater magnification and a larger field of view than a convex lens. Newton's first mirror was 1.3 inches in diameter; such mirrors were rarely more than 3 inches in diameter.

Because of the poor reflectivity of mirrors made of speculum metal, Herschel eliminated the small diagonal mirror of a standard newtonian reflector from his design and tilted his primary mirror so he could view the formed image directly. This "front view" design has come to be called the Herschelian telescope.

The creation of larger, symmetrical mirrors was extremely difficult. Any flaw would result in a blurred image. Because no one else was making mirrors of the size and magnification desired by Herschel, he determined to make his own. This was no small undertaking. He was assisted by his sister Caroline and other family members. Caroline Herschel described the pouring of a 30-foot-focal-length mirror:

Herschel is reported to have cast, ground, and polished more than four hundred mirrors for telescopes, varying in size from 6 to 48 inches in diameter. Herschel and his assistants built and sold at least sixty complete telescopes of various sizes.
Commissions for the making and selling of mirrors and telescopes provided Herschel with an additional source of income. The King of Spain reportedly paid £3,150 for a telescope.

An essential part of constructing and maintaining telescopes was the grinding and polishing of their mirrors. This had to be done repeatedly, whenever the mirrors deformed or tarnished during use.
The only way to test the accuracy of a mirror was to use it.

40ft telescope

The largest and most famous of Herschel's telescopes was a reflecting telescope with a 49½-inch-diameter (1.26 m) primary mirror and a  focal length. The 40-foot telescope was, at that time, the largest scientific instrument that had been built. It was hailed as a triumph of "human perseverance and zeal for the sublimest science".

In 1785 Herschel approached King George for money to cover the cost of building the 40-foot telescope. He received £4,000. Without royal patronage, the telescope could not have been created. As it was, it took five years, and went over budget.

The Herschel home in Slough became a scramble of "labourers and workmen, smiths and carpenters". A 40-foot telescope tube had to be cast of iron. The tube was large enough to walk through. Mirror blanks were poured from Speculum metal, a mix of copper and tin. They were almost four feet (1.2 m) in diameter and weighed 1,000 pounds (454 kg). When the first disk deformed due to its weight, a second thicker one was made with a higher content of copper. The mirrors had to be hand-polished, a painstaking process. A mirror was repeatedly put into the telescope and removed again to ensure that it was properly formed. When a mirror deformed or tarnished, it had to be removed, repolished and replaced in the apparatus. A huge rotating platform was built to support the telescope, enabling it to be repositioned by assistants as a sweep progressed. A platform near the top of the tube enabled the viewer to look down into the tube and view the resulting image.

In 1789, shortly after this instrument was operational, Herschel discovered a new moon of Saturn: Mimas, only 250 miles (400 km) in diameter. Discovery of a second moon (Enceladus) followed, within the first month of observation.

The 40-foot (12.2-metre) telescope proved very cumbersome, and in spite of its size, not very effective at showing clearer images. Herschel's technological innovations had taken him to the limits of what was possible with the technology of his day. The 40-foot would not be improved upon until the Victorians developed techniques for the precision engineering of large, high-quality mirrors. 
William Herschel was disappointed with it.
Most of Herschel's observations were done with a smaller ,  reflector. Nonetheless, the 40-foot caught the public imagination. It inspired scientists and writers including Erasmus Darwin and William Blake, and impressed foreign tourists and French dignitaries. King George was pleased.

Herschel discovered that unfilled telescope apertures can be used to obtain high angular resolution, something which became the essential basis for interferometric imaging in astronomy (in particular aperture masking interferometry and hypertelescopes).

Reconstruction of the 20-foot telescope
In 2012, the BBC television programme Stargazing Live built a replica of the 20-foot telescope using Herschel's original plans but modern materials. It is to be considered a close modern approximation rather than an exact replica. A modern glass mirror was used, the frame uses metal scaffolding and the tube is a sewer pipe. The telescope was shown on the programme in January 2013 and stands on the Art, Design and Technology campus of the University of Derby where it will be used for educational purposes.

Life on other celestial bodies 

Herschel was sure that he had found ample evidence of life on the Moon and compared it to the English countryside. He did not refrain himself from theorising that the other planets were populated, with a special interest in Mars, which was in line with most of his contemporary scientists. During Herschel's time, scientists tended to believe in a plurality of civilised worlds; in contrast, most religious thinkers referred to unique properties of the earth.
Herschel went so far to speculate that the interior of the sun was populated.

Sunspots, climate and wheat yields 
Herschel examined the correlation of solar variation and solar cycle and climate. Over a period of 40 years (1779–1818), Herschel regularly observed sunspots and their variations in number, form and size. Most of his observations took place in a period of low solar activity, the Dalton Minimum, when sunspots were relatively few in number. This was one of the reasons why Herschel was not able to identify the standard 11-year period in solar activity.
Herschel compared his observations with the series of wheat prices published by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.

In 1801, Herschel reported his findings to the Royal Society and indicated five prolonged periods of few sunspots correlated with the price of wheat. Herschel's study was ridiculed by some of his contemporaries but did initiate further attempts to find a correlation. Later in the 19th century, William Stanley Jevons proposed the 11-year cycle with Herschel's basic idea of a correlation between the low number of sunspots and lower yields explaining recurring booms and slumps in the economy.

Herschel's speculation on a connection between sunspots and regional climate, using the market price of wheat as a proxy, continues to be cited.
According to one study, the influence of solar activity can actually be seen on the historical wheat market in England over ten solar cycles between 1600 and 1700. The evaluation is controversial and the significance of the correlation is doubted by some scientists.

Further discoveries

In his later career, Herschel discovered two moons of Saturn, Mimas and Enceladus; as well as two moons of Uranus, Titania and Oberon. He did not give these moons their names; they were named by his son John in 1847 and 1852, respectively, after his death. Herschel measured the axial tilt of Mars and discovered that the Martian ice caps, first observed by Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1666) and Christiaan Huygens (1672), changed size with that planet's seasons. It has been suggested that Herschel discovered rings around Uranus.

Herschel introduced but did not create the word "asteroid", meaning star-like (from the Greek asteroeides, aster "star" + -eidos "form, shape"), in 1802 (shortly after Olbers discovered the second minor planet, 2 Pallas, in late March), to describe the star-like appearance of the small moons of the giant planets and of the minor planets; the planets all show discs, by comparison. By the 1850s 'asteroid' became a standard term for describing certain minor planets.

From studying the proper motion of stars, the nature and extent of the solar motion was first demonstrated by Herschel in 1783, along with first determining the direction for the solar apex to Lambda Herculis, only 10° away from today's accepted position.

Herschel also studied the structure of the Milky Way and was the first to propose a model of the galaxy based on observation and measurement. He concluded that it was in the shape of a disk, but incorrectly assumed that the sun was in the centre of the disk. This heliocentric view was eventually replaced by galactocentrism due to the work of Harlow Shapley, Heber Doust Curtis and Edwin Hubble in the 1900s. All three men used significantly more far-reaching and accurate telescopes than Herschel's.

Discovery of infrared radiation in sunlight 
In early 1800, Herschel was testing different filters to pass sunlight through, and noticed that filters of different colors seemed to generate varying amounts of heat. He decided to pass the light through a prism to measure the different colors of light using a thermometer, and in the process, took a measurement just beyond the red end of the visible spectrum. He detected a temperature one degree higher than that of red light. Further experimentation led to Herschel's conclusion that there must be an invisible form of light beyond the visible spectrum. He published these results in April 1800.

Biology
Herschel used a microscope to establish that coral was not a plant – as many at the time believed – because it lacked the cell walls characteristic of plants. It is in fact an animal, a marine invertebrate.

Family and death

On 8 May 1788, William Herschel married the widow Mary Pitt (née Baldwin) at St Laurence's Church, Upton in Slough. They had one child, John, born at Observatory House on 7 March 1792. William's personal background and rise as man of science had a profound impact on the upbringing of his son and grandchildren. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1788. In 1816, William was made a Knight of the Royal Guelphic Order by the Prince Regent and was accorded the honorary title 'Sir' although this was not the equivalent of an official British knighthood. He helped to found the Astronomical Society of London in 1820, which in 1831 received a royal charter and became the Royal Astronomical Society. In 1813, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

On 25 August 1822, Herschel died at Observatory House, Windsor Road, Slough, after a long illness. He was buried at nearby St Laurence's Church, Upton, Slough. Herschel's epitaph is

Caroline was deeply distressed by his death, and soon after his burial she returned to Hanover, a decision she later regretted. She had lived in England for fifty years. Her interests were much more in line with her nephew John Herschel, also an astronomer, than with her surviving family in Hanover. She continued to work on the organization and cataloguing of nebulae, creating what would later become the basis of the New General Catalogue. She died on 9 January 1848.

Memorial
William Herschel lived most of his life in the town of Slough, then in Buckinghamshire (now in Berkshire). He died in the town and was buried under the tower of the Church of St Laurence, Upton-cum-Chalvey, near Slough.

Herschel is especially honoured in Slough and there are several memorials to him and his discoveries. In 2011 a new bus station, the design of which was inspired by the infrared experiment of William Herschel, was built in the centre of Slough.

His house at 19 New King Street in Bath, Somerset, where he made many telescopes and first observed Uranus, is now home to the Herschel Museum of Astronomy.

There is a memorial  near the choir screen in Westminster Abbey.

Musical works
Herschel's complete musical works were as follows:
 18 symphonies for small orchestra (1760–1762)
 6 symphonies for large orchestra (1762–1764)
 12 concertos for oboe, violin and viola (1759–1764)
 2 concertos for organ
 6 sonatas for violin, cello and harpsichord (published 1769)
 12 solos for violin and basso continuo (1763)
 24 capriccios and 1 sonata for solo violin
 1 andante for two basset horns, two oboes, two horns and two bassoons.

Various vocal works including a "Te Deum", psalms, motets and sacred chants along with some catches.
 
Keyboard works for organ and harpsichord: 
 6 fugues for organ 
 24 sonatas for organ (10 now lost) 
 33 voluntaries and pieces for organ (incomplete) 
 24 pieces for organ (incomplete) 
 12 voluntaries (11 now lost)
 12 sonatas for harpsichord (9 extant)
 25 variations on an ascending scale 
 2 minuets for harpsichord

Named after Herschel

 The astrological symbol for planet Uranus () features the capital initial letter of Herschel's surname.
 Mu Cephei is also known as Herschel's Garnet Star
 Herschel, a crater on the Moon
 Herschel, a large impact basin on Mars
 The enormous crater Herschel on Saturn's moon Mimas
 The Herschel gap in Saturn's rings.
 2000 Herschel, an asteroid
 The William Herschel Telescope on La Palma
 The Herschel Space Observatory, successfully launched by the European Space Agency on 14 May 2009. It is the largest space telescope of its kind
 Herschel Grammar School, Slough
 Rue Herschel, a street in the 6th arrondissement of Paris.
 The Herschel Building at Bath College, Bath
 The Herschel building at Newcastle University, Newcastle, United Kingdom
 Herschel Museum of Astronomy, at 19 New King Street in Bath.
 Herschelschule, Hanover, Germany, a grammar school
 The Herschel Observatory, at the Universitas School in Santos, Brazil.
 The lunar crater C. Herschel, the asteroid 281 Lucretia, and the comet 35P/Herschel-Rigollet are named after his sister Caroline Herschel.
 The public house "Herschel Arms" at 22 Park Street, Slough is named after him and is quite close to the site of Observatory House.
 Herschel Astronomical Society, the operator of the Herschel Memorial Observatory based in Eton, Berkshire.
 Herschel Park, Slough.
 The shape of Slough Bus Station, built in 2011, was inspired by Herschel's infrared experiment.
 Herschel Street, a street in Brisbane, Australia.

See also

 Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars
 German inventors and discoverers
 List of astronomical instrument makers
 List of largest optical telescopes historically
NGC 4800
NGC 4694

References

Sources

Further reading
 "William Herschel" by Michael Hoskin. New Dictionary of Scientific Biography Scribners, 2008. v. 3, pp. 289–291.
 Biography: JRASC 74 (1980) 134

External links

 
 Articles and letters published in the Philosophical Transactions and available online (70 items, June 2016)
 William Herschel's Deep Sky Catalog
 The William Herschel Double Star Catalogs Restored
 Full text of 
 Full text of The Story of the Herschels (1886) from Project Gutenberg
 Portraits of William Herschel at the National Portrait Gallery (United Kingdom)
 Herschel Museum of Astronomy located in his Bath home
 William Herschel Society
 The Oboe Concertos of Sir William Herschel, Wilbert Davis Jerome ed. 
 
 A notebook of Herschel's, dated from 1759  is available in the digital collections of the Linda Hall Library.
 Portraits of William Herschel (and other members of the family) from the Lick Observatory Records Digital Archive, UC Santa Cruz Library's Digital Collections 
 Michael Lemonick: William Herschel, the First Observational Cosmologist, 12 November 2008, Fermilab Colloquium, Text
 
 Musical pieces by William Herschel @YouTube:
 
  (Chamber Symphony in F, 2nd movement)
 
 
 
 

1738 births
1822 deaths
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William
Uranus, the seventh planet of the Solar System, has 27 known moons, most of which are named after characters that appear in, or are mentioned in, the works of William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. Uranus's moons are divided into three groups: thirteen inner moons, five major moons, and nine irregular moons. The inner and major moons all have prograde orbits, while orbits of the irregulars are mostly retrograde. The inner moons are small dark bodies that share common properties and origins with Uranus's rings. The five major moons are ellipsoidal, indicating that they reached hydrostatic equilibrium at some point in their past (and may still be in equilibrium), and four of them show signs of internally driven processes such as canyon formation and volcanism on their surfaces. The largest of these five, Titania, is 1,578 km in diameter and the eighth-largest moon in the Solar System, about one-twentieth the mass of the Earth's Moon. The orbits of the regular moons are nearly coplanar with Uranus's equator, which is tilted 97.77° to its orbit. Uranus's irregular moons have elliptical and strongly inclined (mostly retrograde) orbits at large distances from the planet.

William Herschel discovered the first two moons, Titania and Oberon, in 1787. The other three ellipsoidal moons were discovered in 1851 by William Lassell (Ariel and Umbriel) and in 1948 by Gerard Kuiper (Miranda). These five may be in hydrostatic equilibrium, and so would be considered dwarf planets if they were in direct orbit about the Sun. The remaining moons were discovered after 1985, either during the Voyager 2 flyby mission or with the aid of advanced Earth-based telescopes.

Discovery 
The first two moons to be discovered were Titania and Oberon, which were spotted by Sir William Herschel on January 11, 1787, six years after he had discovered the planet itself. Later, Herschel thought he had discovered up to six moons (see below) and perhaps even a ring. For nearly 50 years, Herschel's instrument was the only one with which the moons had been seen. In the 1840s, better instruments and a more favorable position of Uranus in the sky led to sporadic indications of satellites additional to Titania and Oberon. Eventually, the next two moons, Ariel and Umbriel, were discovered by William Lassell in 1851. The Roman numbering scheme of Uranus's moons was in a state of flux for a considerable time, and publications hesitated between Herschel's designations (where Titania and Oberon are Uranus II and IV) and William Lassell's (where they are sometimes I and II). With the confirmation of Ariel and Umbriel, Lassell numbered the moons I through IV from Uranus outward, and this finally stuck. In 1852, Herschel's son John Herschel gave the four then-known moons their names.

No other discoveries were made for almost another century. In 1948, Gerard Kuiper at the McDonald Observatory discovered the smallest and the last of the five large, spherical moons, Miranda. Decades later, the flyby of the Voyager 2 space probe in January 1986 led to the discovery of ten further inner moons. Another satellite, Perdita, was discovered in 1999 after studying old Voyager photographs.

Uranus was the last giant planet without any known irregular moons, but since 1997 nine distant irregular moons have been identified using ground-based telescopes. Two more small inner moons, Cupid and Mab, were discovered using the Hubble Space Telescope in 2003. As of 2020, the moon Margaret was the last Uranian moon discovered, and its characteristics were published in October 2003.

Spurious moons 
After Herschel discovered Titania and Oberon on January 11, 1787, he subsequently believed that he had observed four other moons: two on January 18 and February 9, 1790, and two more on February 28 and March 26, 1794. It was thus believed for many decades thereafter that Uranus had a system of six satellites, though the four latter moons were never confirmed by any other astronomer. Lassell's observations of 1851, in which he discovered Ariel and Umbriel, however, failed to support Herschel's observations; Ariel and Umbriel, which Herschel certainly ought to have seen if he had seen any satellites beside Titania and Oberon, did not correspond to any of Herschel's four additional satellites in orbital characteristics. Herschel's four spurious satellites were thought to have sidereal periods of 5.89 days (interior to Titania), 10.96 days (between Titania and Oberon), 38.08 days, and 107.69 days (exterior to Oberon). It was therefore concluded that Herschel's four satellites were spurious, probably arising from the misidentification of faint stars in the vicinity of Uranus as satellites, and the credit for the discovery of Ariel and Umbriel was given to Lassell.

Names 

Although the first two Uranian moons were discovered in 1787, they were not named until 1852, a year after two more moons had been discovered. The responsibility for naming was taken by John Herschel, son of the discoverer of Uranus. Herschel, instead of assigning names from Greek mythology, named the moons after magical spirits in English literature: the fairies Oberon and Titania from William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the sylph Ariel and gnome Umbriel from Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock (Ariel is also a sprite in Shakespeare's The Tempest). The reasoning was presumably that Uranus, as god of the sky and air, would be attended by spirits of the air.

Subsequent names, rather than continuing the airy spirits theme (only Puck and Mab continued the trend), have focused on Herschel's source material. In 1949, the fifth moon, Miranda, was named by its discoverer Gerard Kuiper after a thoroughly mortal character in Shakespeare's The Tempest. The current IAU practice is to name moons after characters from Shakespeare's plays and The Rape of the Lock (although at present only Ariel, Umbriel, and Belinda have names drawn from the latter; all the rest are from Shakespeare). The outer retrograde moons are all named after characters from one play, The Tempest; the sole known outer prograde moon, Margaret, is named from Much Ado About Nothing.

 The Rape of the Lock (a poem by Alexander Pope):
 Ariel, Umbriel, Belinda
 Plays by William Shakespeare:
 A Midsummer Night's Dream: Titania, Oberon, Puck
 The Tempest: (Ariel), Miranda, Caliban, Sycorax, Prospero, Setebos, Stephano, Trinculo, Francisco, Ferdinand
 King Lear: Cordelia
 Hamlet: Ophelia
 The Taming of the Shrew: Bianca
 Troilus and Cressida: Cressida
 Othello: Desdemona
 Romeo and Juliet: Juliet, Mab
 The Merchant of Venice: Portia
 As You Like It: Rosalind
 Much Ado About Nothing: Margaret
 The Winter's Tale: Perdita
 Timon of Athens: Cupid

Some asteroids, also named after the same Shakespearean characters, share names with moons of Uranus: 171 Ophelia, 218 Bianca, 593 Titania, 666 Desdemona, 763 Cupido, and 2758 Cordelia.

Characteristics and groups 

The Uranian satellite system is the least massive among those of the giant planets. Indeed, the combined mass of the five major satellites is less than half that of Triton (the seventh-largest moon in the Solar System) alone. The largest of the satellites, Titania, has a radius of 788.9 km, or less than half that of the Moon, but slightly more than that of Rhea, the second-largest moon of Saturn, making Titania the eighth-largest moon in the Solar System. Uranus is about 10,000 times more massive than its moons.

Inner moons 

As of 2020, Uranus is known to have 13 inner moons. Their orbits lie inside that of Miranda. All inner moons are intimately connected with the rings of Uranus, which probably resulted from the fragmentation of one or several small inner moons. The two innermost moons (Cordelia and Ophelia) are shepherds of Uranus's ε ring, whereas the small moon Mab is a source of Uranus's outermost μ ring. There may be two additional small (2–7 km in radius) undiscovered shepherd moons located about 100 km exterior to Uranus's α and β rings.

At 162 km, Puck is the largest of the inner moons of Uranus and the only one imaged by Voyager 2 in any detail. Puck and Mab are the two outermost inner satellites of Uranus. All inner moons are dark objects; their geometrical albedo is less than 10%. They are composed of water ice contaminated with a dark material, probably radiation-processed organics.

The small inner moons constantly perturb each other. The system is chaotic and apparently unstable. Simulations show that the moons may perturb each other into crossing orbits, which may eventually result in collisions between the moons. Desdemona may collide with either Cressida or Juliet within the next 100 million years.

Large moons 
Uranus has five major moons: Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon. They range in diameter from 472 km for Miranda to 1578 km for Titania. All these moons are relatively dark objects: their geometrical albedo varies between 30 and 50%, whereas their Bond albedo is between 10 and 23%. Umbriel is the darkest moon and Ariel the brightest. The masses of the moons range from 6.7 kg (Miranda) to 3.5 kg (Titania). For comparison, the Moon has a mass of 7.5 kg. The major moons of Uranus are thought to have formed in the accretion disc, which existed around Uranus for some time after its formation or resulted from a large impact suffered by Uranus early in its history. This view is supported by their large thermal inertia, a surface property they share with dwarf planets like Pluto and Haumea. It differs strongly from the thermal behaviour of the Uranian irregular moons that is comparable to classical trans-Neptunian objects. This suggests a separate origin.

All major moons comprise approximately equal amounts rock and ice, except Miranda, which is made primarily of ice. The ice component may include ammonia and carbon dioxide. Their surfaces are heavily cratered, though all of them (except Umbriel) show signs of endogenic resurfacing in the form of lineaments (canyons) and, in the case of Miranda, ovoid race-track like structures called coronae. Extensional processes associated with upwelling diapirs are likely responsible for the origin of the coronae. Ariel appears to have the youngest surface with the fewest impact craters, while Umbriel's appears oldest. A past 3:1 orbital resonance between Miranda and Umbriel and a past 4:1 resonance between Ariel and Titania are thought to be responsible for the heating that caused substantial endogenic activity on Miranda and Ariel.
One piece of evidence for such a past resonance is Miranda's unusually high orbital inclination (4.34°) for a body so close to the planet. The largest Uranian moons may be internally differentiated, with rocky cores at their centers surrounded by ice mantles. Titania and Oberon may harbor liquid water oceans at the core/mantle boundary. The major moons of Uranus are airless bodies. For instance, Titania was shown to possess no atmosphere at a pressure larger than 10–20 nanobar.

The path of the Sun in the local sky over the course of a local day during Uranus's and its major moons' summer solstice is quite different from that seen on most other Solar System worlds. The major moons have almost exactly the same rotational axial tilt as Uranus (their axes are parallel to that of Uranus). The Sun would appear to follow a circular path around Uranus's celestial pole in the sky, at the closest about 7 degrees from it. Near the equator, it would be seen nearly due north or due south (depending on the season). At latitudes higher than 7°, the Sun would trace a circular path about 15 degrees in diameter in the sky, and never set.

Irregular moons 

As of 2005 Uranus is known to have nine irregular moons, which orbit it at a distance much greater than that of Oberon, the furthest of the large moons. All the irregular moons are probably captured objects that were trapped by Uranus soon after its formation. The diagram illustrates the orbits of those irregular moons discovered so far. The moons above the X axis are prograde, those beneath are retrograde. The radius of the Uranian Hill sphere is approximately 73 million km.

Uranus's irregular moons range in size from 120–200 km (Sycorax) to about 20 km (Trinculo). Unlike Jupiter's irregulars, Uranus's show no correlation of axis with inclination. Instead, the retrograde moons can be divided into two groups based on axis/orbital eccentricity. The inner group includes those satellites closer to Uranus (a < 0.15 rH) and moderately eccentric (~0.2), namely Francisco, Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo. The outer group (a > 0.15 rH) includes satellites with high eccentricity (~0.5): Sycorax, Prospero, Setebos, and Ferdinand.

The intermediate inclinations 60° < i < 140° are devoid of known moons due to the Kozai instability. In this instability region, solar perturbations at apoapse cause the moons to acquire large eccentricities that lead to collisions with inner satellites or ejection. The lifetime of moons in the instability region is from 10 million to a billion years.

Margaret is the only known irregular prograde moon of Uranus, and it currently has the most eccentric orbit of any moon in the Solar System, though Neptune's moon Nereid has a higher mean eccentricity. As of 2008, Margaret's eccentricity is 0.7979.

List 

The Uranian moons are listed here by orbital period, from shortest to longest. Moons massive enough for their surfaces to have collapsed into a spheroid are highlighted in light blue and bolded. The inner and major moons all have prograde orbits. Irregular moons with retrograde orbits are shown in dark grey. Margaret, the only known irregular moon of Uranus with a prograde orbit, is shown in light grey. The orbits and mean distances of the irregular moons are variable over short timescales due to frequent planetary and solar perturbations, therefore the listed orbital elements of all irregular moons are averaged over a 8,000-year numerical integration by Brozović and Jacobson (2009). Their orbital elements are all based on the epoch of 1 January 2000 Terrestrial Time.

Sources: NASA/NSSDC, Sheppard, et al. 2005. For the recently discovered outer irregular moons (Francisco through Ferdinand) the most accurate orbital data can be generated with the Minor Planet Center's Natural Satellites Ephemeris Service. The irregulars are significantly perturbed by the Sun.

See also 
List of natural satellites

Notes

References

External links 

 Scott S. Sheppard: Uranus Moons
 Simulation Showing the location of Uranus's Moons
 
 
 Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature—Uranus (USGS)

 
Lists of moons Solar eclipses on Uranus occur when any of the natural satellites of Uranus passes in front of the Sun as seen from Uranus. Eclipses can occur only near a solar ring plane-crossing of Uranus (equinox), occurring approximately every 42 years, with the last crossing being in 2007/2008.

For bodies that appear smaller in angular diameter than the Sun, the proper term would be a transit and bodies that are larger than the apparent size of the Sun, the proper term would be an occultation.

Twelve satellites of Uranus—Cressida, Desdemona, Juliet, Portia, Rosalind, Belinda, Puck, Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon—are large enough and near enough to eclipse the Sun.

All other satellites of Uranus are too small or too distant to produce an umbra.

At its distance from the Sun, the Sun's angular diameter is reduced to a tiny disk about 2 arcminutes across. The angular diameters of the moons large enough to fully eclipse the sun are: Cressida, 6–8'; Desdemona, 6–7'; Juliet, 10–12'; Portia, 9–13'; Rosalind, 4–5'; Belinda, 6–8'; Puck, 6–8'; Miranda, 10–15'; Ariel, 20–23'; Umbriel, 15–17'; Titania, 11–13'; Oberon, 8–9'.

References

External links
Brufau, Rainer. (2021). Triple shadow phenomena on Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus from 1000 CE to 3000 CE (Version 0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5515898

Solar eclipses by planet
Uranus