Portrait of William Herschel Courtesy of NASA/JPL, California Institute of Technology.

William Herschel was born in Germany and lived in England as he worked as an astronomer. He lived between 1738-1822. He built high magnification telescopes that let him observe the heavens with greater detail.

Herschel discovered the planet Uranus and advanced our understanding of nebulae, the hazy clouds that surround dying stars. He also founded stellar astronomy, the study of the region beyond our own solar system. Our modern sense of a galaxy's shape is very similar to what Herschel had proposed hundreds of years earlier.