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Updated: June 5, 2025
Sir William Herschel's catalogues of double stars offer a considerable number to which he ascribes a decided green or blue tint. In binary combinations, when the small star appears very blue or very green, the large one is usually yellow or red. It does not appear that the great astronomer took sufficient interest in this circumstance.
Herschel's telescope, forty English feet in length, allowed of the realization of an idea, the advantages of which would not be sufficiently appreciated if I did not here recall to mind some facts.
Persons in general, I may even say the greater part of astronomers, know not what was the effect that the great forty-foot telescope had in the labours and discoveries of Herschel. These assertions are distinctly contradicted by Herschel's own words.
But it did not require much arguing on the part of Doctor Watson when he presented Herschel's name for membership in the Royal Society for that most respectable body of scholars to at once pass favorably on the nomination. As one member in seconding the motion put it, "Herschel honors us in accepting this membership, quite as much as we do him in granting it."
It has been possible here only to sketch out the chief personal points in his career, without dwelling much upon the scientific importance of his later life-long labours; but it must suffice to say briefly upon this point that Herschel's work was no mere mechanical star-finding; it was the most profoundly philosophical astronomical work ever performed, except perhaps Newton's and Laplace's.
The first few lines of the eulogium just quoted allude to Herschel's absence from England. This was not merely an episode of interest in the career of Herschel, it was the occasion of one of the greatest scientific expeditions in the whole history of astronomy.
Indeed, the existence of this central heat, a residuum of that which kept all matter in a vaporiform chaos at first, is amongst the most solid discoveries of modern science, and the support which it gives to Herschel's explanation of the formation of worlds is most important.
Dreyer's New General Catalogue, published in 1888 as vol. xlix. of the Royal Astronomical Society's Memoirs, is an enlargement of Herschel's work. Mem. R. A. S.; but the data requisite for their formation into a catalogue were not forthcoming.
The ordinary spectator, looking upon the face of the heavens through a telescope, had, prior to Herschel's time, felt his curiosity excited by the appearance here and there of filmy patches, vague in structure and irregular in shape, which, from their resemblance to clouds, received the name of nebulae. What these were, no astronomer had succeeded in defining.
The time had now evidently come for a fundamental revision of current notions respecting the nature of the sun. Herschel's theory of a cool, dark, habitable globe, surrounded by, and protected against, the radiations of a luminous and heat-giving envelope, was shattered by the first dicta of spectrum analysis.
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