William Hershal was raised in a family of musicians. As he grew older he studied from a book entitled “Harmonics”, by Robert Smith. After reading it another one of Smith’s book caught his attention, “The Compleat System of Optiks”, an introduction to telescope construction.
Hershel wanted a telescope, but they were expensive. So, he set out to build his own. After multiple failed attempts and several successes, he finally completed construction of optics of “superb quality.” The telescope, which included the magnifying power of 6,450x, was found to be “far superior even to those used at the Greenwich Observatory.” In 1781, after completing several mappings of the night sky, Hershel (et al) observed an object that was not a star. It turned out to be the discovery of the planet Uranus.
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The discovery of Uranus led other scientists to an observation of how the planet’s orbit seemed to “wobbled”. In 1820 this question led Alexis Bouvard to successfully calculating the exact orbit of Uranus. And then, in 1845, an astronomer named Urbain Le Verrier discovered that the “wobble” of Uranus was caused by an orbital body whose gravity was causing a shift in the orbit of Uranus. He soon published a manuscript outlining the orbit of “a missing planet” in the solar system, and in 1846 publish the precise prediction of location of the planet in the night sky. Many of Verrier’s peers in France were too busy to confirm his conclusion, so Verrier wrote to a German astronomer named Johann Gottfried Galle. He and his assistant, Heinrich d'Arrest, searched for the planet predicted by Verrier and confirmed his finding on September 25,