Patrick Edwards, age 12, of Indianapolis, Indiana, for his question:
Why is Herschel called the Father of Stellar Astronomy?
The name Herschel belongs to a family of time honored astronomers. From the 1750's to the 1870's they contributed to science on a cosmic scale. William, Caroline and John Herschel loved astronomy much as you love baseball or stamp collecting, spelunking or making model planes.
William Herschel was born in Germany and scheduled to become a musician. At 19, he went to England, became an organist and directed an immense band. He also had immense plans for his hobby of star gazing. Nobody had made a systematic survey of the stars in the entire sky and young William Herschel wanted to do this impossible job. And he worked out a method to do it step by patient step. Later in life, his hobby became a full time career. The astronomical project succeeded, bringing honors from the world of science and a title from the King of England. William became Sir William Herschel. Herschel's method of surveying the heavens was basically simple and infinitely tedious: He studied a small section of the sky through a telescope, counted the stars in the field of vision and gauged their positions. As he studied the heavens, section by section, he formed a survey of the entire sky. This method of stellar astronomy fathered by William Herschel in the 1770's still has value today.
Caroline Herschel went to England and worked with her brother William on the stupendous project. Through many long years, they made a complete stellar survey of the skies above the Northern Hemisphere. William's son, Sir John Herschel, later went to South Africa and surveyed the starry heavens from south of the equator. Together, the Herschel family charted the celestial sphere surrounding the entire globe.
As William's project progressed, it naturally led to some unexpected discoveries. He was especially interested in the many double stars. The mathematics learned as a musician. enabled him to figure out their orbital patterns, and these heavenly twins became useful yardsticks in gauging stellar positions. Herschel was able .to figure out the sun's position in the vast, celestial cartwheel of our Galaxy. In 1781, he found Uranus and introduced the world to another planet of the Solar System.
In 1864, Sir John Herschel published a General Catalogue of Nebulae which detailed the family's celestial surveys. It contained many thousands of items. Only a few hundred of them had been recorded by other observers. Later, this work was updated with new listings and renamed the New General Catalogue. The survey notes each celestial object with a number and the letters NGC.
William Herschel was dissatisfied with the telescopes of his day. So with his own hands he ground lenses to make better ones. The last of a long series of improvements was an 18¬inch reflector telescope in a 20 foot tube mounted on a wooden scaffold. John Herschel took this telescope to South Africa and used it to survey the skies above the Southern Hemisphere.