The Georgian Star Author: Michael D Lemonick Publisher: W W Norton ISBN: 978-0-393-06574-9 Price: £17.99 (Hb), 224pp
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This is an engaging and accessible biography that not only describes the lives and work of William and Caroline Herschel, but also gives insights into the way they thought about
astronomy, which was quite unique for their time. They were not a wealthy or aristocratic family and William earned his living as a musician for many years, first in his native Hanover and then in England. After Caroline came to live with him in Bath, she too became a professional singer.

Over the years, William's interest in astronomy developed into an increasingly time-consuming obsession and he recruited Caroline and their brother Alexander to help him build telescopes and record observations. Lemonick writes that William was an all-round astronomical genius. He not only made meticulous observations through telescopes that he had built himself, including some of the most powerful of his day, but he also theorised extensively, writing many papers on a wide variety of subjects. Caroline, too, was a remarkable astronomer. At first her brother's unpaid assistant, she later went on to discover eight new comets and a number of nebulae on her own. So notable were her achievements that King George III granted her an annual pension of £50, at a time when it was unheard of for a woman to earn her own salary as an astronomer.

On 13 March 1781 William discovered the planet Uranus, which he named the Georgian Star in honour of the King. This discovery brought him fame and a pension of ?200 a year, but Herschel himself considered it much less important than his search for double stars and nebulae. Later in life he also discovered infrared radiation but, to Lemonick, the Herschels' most important contribution to astronomy was the technique they developed of surveying the entire sky, cataloguing objects of various types and then using those catalogues to understand the structure and evolution of the Universe. This technique, Lemonick argues, is perhaps the single most important tool of modern astronomy.

Full of anecdotes and insights into the personalities of the Herschel siblings, this book is an informative and entertaining introduction to two astronomers who changed the way we observe and understand the Universe.

Elizabeth Sourbut