William Herschel was born to a family of musicians in 1738. As such, he was a musician, but that wasn't where his interests laid. He was interested in astronomy and would spend his nights looking at the heavens. He soon realized that his telescopes were horrible and started making his own. His telescopes became the best in the world and allowed him to see much farther. While the goal of most astronomers was to chart the positions of planets and stars in the sky using mathematics, Herschel, however, was interested in the evolution of stars, and not their positions. When he discovered Uranus in 1781, he thought it was merely a comet. He contacted other astronomers about the new discovery. A month later astronomer Nevil Maskelyne suggested that