{"id":2795,"date":"2009-02-28T01:48:32","date_gmt":"2009-02-28T01:48:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/?p=2795"},"modified":"2010-11-18T02:11:31","modified_gmt":"2010-11-18T02:11:31","slug":"mars-jupiter-saturn-george","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/2009\/02\/28\/mars-jupiter-saturn-george\/","title":{"rendered":"Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, George?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The sun is shining, the outside doors are open, and from the window of the Royal Society<\/a> library I can see the tops of trees along the Mall.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Michael
Michael Lemonick is introduced by the Royal Society's Felicity Henderson (photo, thanks Sven Klinge)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Today, at this first in a season of lunchtime talks at the RS, I’m learning from\u00a0 Michael Lemonick<\/a> some things I never knew about William and Caroline Herschel.<\/p>\n

You can hear the audio and video (slides) yourself on the RS podcast page<\/a>.\u00a0 Lemonick’s book ‘The Georgian Star’ is published by W.W.Norton.Co.\u00a0 In the meantime, this short commentary.<\/p>\n

\"Michael
Michael Lemonick at the Royal Society (photo, thanks Sven Klinge)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Sir William Herschel is best known as the discoverer of Uranus, a planet that did indeed in the days of William’s sponsor George III go by the popular name of George or ‘Georgium Sidus’ to be precise.\u00a0 But discovering light blue planets that spin at a funny angle is only part of William’s and his sister Caroline’s\u00a0 story.<\/p>\n

Having moved to London from Germany, William Herschel the music teacher was enthralled by the stars he saw overhead whilst travelling between clients.\u00a0 Disappointed with the telescopes of the day, he started to build a whole series of his own that would culminate in a 4ft mirrored, 40 ft long giant sponsored by the King himself.<\/p>\n

\"William
William Herschel (photo WikiCommons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Joined by his sister in Bath, both Herschel’s were professional astronomers in the pay of the King, making Caroline the first ever professional female astronomer (he on \u00a3200pa, she as ‘assistant’ on \u00a350pa).<\/p>\n

Between them they discovered 3000 galaxies, and Caroline alone identified 8 comets.\u00a0 Uranus<\/a> was mistakenly declared a comet on its discovery in 1781.\u00a0 Impressively, the Herschel star charts were still in practical use into the 1950s and 60s.<\/p>\n

\"catherine_herschel\"
Caroline Herschel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\n

The Herschel’s were amongst the first astronomers to take an interest in the structure and evolution of the universe, rather than following the more practical motivations of the time – like enabling better navigation at sea.\u00a0 William tried to measure stellar distance by the parallax<\/a> method, but failed due to equipment sensitivity.\u00a0 He was more successful at plotting out the shape of our galaxy – the Milky Way.<\/p>\n

\"Herschel's
Herschel's plot of our galaxy (image WikiCommons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

William Herschel is in some ways the father of infra-red astronomy, having discovered the infra-red region of the spectrum from its warming effect on bottles of liquid; he called them ‘calorific rays’.\u00a0\u00a0 As Lemonick pointed out, there seems some injustice in the naming of the James Webb space telescope<\/a> due to launch in 2013, which will work predominantly in the IR spectral range (there is\u00a0 a William Herschel telescope<\/a> already on the Canary Islands) .<\/p>\n

And lastly – I never knew this.\u00a0\u00a0 It was the common belief of the time, shared by Herschel, that all the planets were inhabited, with the sun just another planet – albeit a particularly bright golden one.<\/p>\n

The logic extended to a belief that the luminescent surface of the sun was the visible top side of clouds and, charmingly, that sunspots were holes in the cloud through which – presumably with a powerful enough telescope – one could view ‘sun people’. \u00a0\u00a0 Those were the days…..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The sun is shining, the outside doors are open, and from the window of the Royal Society library I can see the tops of trees along the Mall. Today, at this first in a season of lunchtime talks at the RS, I’m learning from\u00a0 Michael Lemonick some things I never knew about William and Caroline … Continue reading Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, George?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[638,102,101,336,17],"tags":[1421,639,635,637,633,632,156,640,641,636,634],"class_list":["post-2795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","category-biography","category-history","category-space","category-visits","tag-astronomy","tag-bath","tag-caroline-herschel","tag-comet","tag-felicity","tag-michael-lemonick","tag-royal-society","tag-stars","tag-the-georgian-star","tag-uranus","tag-william-herschel"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkpOr-J5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2795"}],"version-history":[{"count":40,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2827,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2795\/revisions\/2827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}