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These musician siblings became rock stars—in astronomy
200 years before Queen’s Brian May became an astrophysicist, William and Caroline Herschel set aside their musical instruments to build telescopes and discover comets, galaxies—and even a planet.
Relative values
Caroline Herschel's diaries record her move in 1772 from Hanover to England to assist her brother (both depicted in a colored lithograph): “I had to struggle against homesickness and knew too little English to derive any consolation from society.” In the following decades she records her integration into English society, her burgeoning interest in William’s astronomy, and her own observations. An entry from August 31, 1791, reads: “I began to sweep at 1.30, from the horizon through the Pleiades up as high as the head of Medusa. Afterwards I continued with horizontal sweeps till daylight was too strong for seeing any longer.”
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