William Herschel

Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel followed his father into a Hanoverian military band, then left for Britain in 1757 at nineteen. He took up astronomy in 1766, built his first large telescope in 1774, and spent nine years surveying double stars. On 13 March 1781, noting an odd object in Gemini, he confirmed after weeks of consultation that it was a new planet - Uranus, the first found since antiquity. George III made him Court Astronomer; the Royal Society elected him a Fellow and funded new instruments. He published catalogues of 2,500 nebulae in 1802 and 5,000 in 1820, proving many were star clusters, and pioneered spectrophotometry with prisms and thermometers - work that led him to infrared radiation. He also refined Mars's rotation period, discovered its polar caps vary seasonally, and found moons of Uranus and Saturn. Knighted in 1816, he became the first President of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1820 and died in August 1822.