Author: Tom Burns-Star Gazing

Every time I use a telescope to show Uranus to someone, I think about the power of technology. Technically speaking, this planet is visible to the naked eye, but humans have not seen it after looking at the entire sky for thousands of years.

One of them needs major technological advancement to figure out what the others have been looking at all these years.

You can easily find Uranus with a pair of cheap binoculars. It is now visible in Aries. You also need a finder chart, which you can find on www.nakedeyeplanets.com/uranus.htm.

In a small amateur telescope, Uranus will only break down into a very small disk. After all, the diameter of this planet is only 31,518 miles, which is about 1.75 billion miles away from us. You can see that the disk is a practical example of telescope technology at work.

Sometimes, I have doubts about technology. The urge to send humans to the moon and provide us with powerful handheld computers disguised as mobile phones has also brought us air pollution, climate change and extreme violent video games.

Technology may or may not improve our lives, but it produces at least one major benefit. With every leap in technology, we have also learned more about the universe.

Uranus is an astronomical example. In 1781, mankind knew that there were about six planets, which was the same fixed number known in all recorded history. Then there is a reflecting telescope, which uses mirrors to collect light from stars and planets.

Unfortunately, building a decent telescope cost the king's ransom. Unless you are a professional astronomer supported by the government or have a wealthy private patron, you are out of luck.

William Herschel is an amateur astronomer, he decided to build his own telescope. His life embodies the critical moment of technological development. If a person has enough talent and dedication, he can change our view of the universe.

He was born as the elector of Hanover, Germany, on November 15, 1738. His original name was Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel (Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel), when Germany was part of the Holy Roman Empire.

His father played the oboe in the Hannover Military Band. According to the practice at the time, William and his brother Jacob learned oboe players early in their lives. By 1855, they had also joined the military band.

At that time, George II of England ruled England and Hanover. The Hanover Guards were called to serve in England in 1855, where the Herschel family briefly experienced British life.

As tensions between England and France increased, the regiment returned to Hanover. After France's victory in the Battle of Hastenbeck in 1757, Herschel's father sent his sons back to a relatively safe place in England.

Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel quickly adapted to his new life as a war refugee. He adopted the British version of his name, Frederick William Herschel. He traveled from one music job to another across England and lived a good life, playing concerts on the oboe, harpsichord, violin and church organ.

Herschel won positions in orchestras, chapels, and churches. During his lifetime, he composed 24 symphonies, many concertos and some church works.

Life is beautiful, but his musical talent and natural curiosity make him want to see the harmony of the universe with his own eyes.

In those days, astronomers used lens-based refractors to study the sky. However, refracting mirrors are expensive and difficult to manufacture. They also produced offensive ribbons, which we call today chromatic aberration.

The reflecting telescope invented by Isaac Newton in 1668 is slowly gaining popularity. Herschel decided to build one herself.

In those days, mirrors were carefully cast and polished with metal mirrors (a mixture of copper and tin). Telescope manufacturers must slowly and painstakingly grind and polish mirrors into precise spherical concave surfaces. Because the metal quickly lost its luster, the mirror had to be removed from the telescope and re-polished every few months.

Herschel had no formal education in mirror making, so he took courses from a local optician. With the help of his family, he cast the discs himself, polished and polished them for 16 hours a day, mixing his obsession with telescopes with his other duties as an organist and composer.

He made an instrument with a 6-inch diameter mirror as his second telescope. According to today's standards, this is a "telescope" for beginners.

With it, he decided to scan the entire sky and record everything he saw. His initial job was to observe and catalog as many star systems as he could while scanning the entire sky of England.

Just after 10 o'clock in the evening on March 13, 1781, Herschel pointed his small telescope in the direction of Taurus and saw a blue dot.

This is a huge leap in technology. Working mainly by himself, Herschel learned to build a telescope large enough to see Uranus (because it is just that way). However, he first concluded that the mysterious blue dot must be a comet or a star broken down into a small disk.

200 years later, anyone can buy a telescope much better than Herschel's elaborate telescope for $300. It is worth pointing your finger in the general direction of Ares and observing Uranus for yourself.

Four nights after his discovery, Herschel returned to his telescope to observe the strange object again. Now he determined that it was a comet because it moved slightly against the background of a fixed star.

Herschel made the most spectacular discovery in the history of astronomy, but he didn't know it.

He observed the object for several months, carefully recording its changing position. The combination of his position data and other astronomers' position data allowed the Swedish mathematician Anders Lexell to calculate the object's orbit, which is a nearly circular orbit around the sun.

The distance of this object from the sun is 19 times that of the earth, and its orbital period is 82 years, which is surprising. At that distance, it must be 35,000 miles wide, more than four times the diameter of our planet.

Herschel did not find a comet. He became the first person in human history to discover a new planet.

Fame and fortune also followed. Fortunately because of his skills as the creator of the telescope. He sold more than 60 telescopes to enthusiasts in Europe and the UK.

He also built telescopes for himself and his sister Caroline. In total, he grinds and polishes more than 300 mirrors of various sizes.

His most powerful telescope was the largest in the world until 1845. It has a 48-inch wide sight glass and a 40-foot long cast iron tube. The mirror alone weighs a little over half a ton.

Herschel was appointed “The King's Astronomer” and elected to the Royal Society, England's most prestigious scientific organization, and received its Copley Medal.

He later concluded that the elements of each of the multiple star systems he carefully cataloged were gravitationally bound and orbited each other.

His discovery of Uranus pales in comparison to his most important contribution. He used a prism to disperse the light from the sun into a rainbow band called the spectrum, which was a well-known technique at the time.

But he went further. He used a simple handheld thermometer to measure the temperature of the red light at the low frequency end of the spectrum. Then he brilliantly measured the temperature of a point next to the red light, where there seemed to be no light.

The temperature of the so-called blank area next to the red is 1 degree higher than the red area.

He discovered that the spectrum is not limited to the colors we see in the visible spectrum. He discovered that infrared light, the invisible light below the red light in the spectrum, inevitably led to the discovery of infrared astronomy and other forms of light.

When I wrote these lines, the whole world was waiting for the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. It will study distant galaxies that formed billions of years ago. The best way is to use infrared light, which is the main light for the work of the Webb telescope.

Ironically, Uranus is usually visible to the naked eye, although it is almost invisible. Astronomers back in ancient times may have seen the seventh planet, shrugged their shoulders as a faint star, and moved on. Herschel's telescope is good enough to see that it is a blue-green spot, and he is curious and can observe it night after night. This makes all the difference.

Morality: The quality of technology depends on the hearts and minds of the people who use it. Remember this the next time you take out your phone.

Tom Burns is the former director of the Perkins Observatory in Delaware.

Tom Burns is the former director of the Perkins Observatory in Delaware.

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