Herschel: Musician & Astronomer

Man has known five of the nine planets of the solar system from remotest antiquity. All of them, with the exception of Mercury, which can be seen only under favorable circumstances because of its closeness to the sun, outshine, or rank with, the brightest of the stars. Venus is the earth's twin in size and mass, and by far the most brilliant, even, at times, startling in its splendor in morning or evening twilight. Mars, with its reddish color and strange surface features, is second to none in interest. Jupiter is the giant of the solar system, exceeding all other planets combined in size and mass; Saturn is unique in possessing a magnificent system of rings. The remaining three planets of the solar system, additional to our own planet Earth, have been discovered within the last two centuries.

Uranus was discovered by Sir William Herschel, by profession a musician, but a man with a love for astronomy so great that he became the greatest of observational astronomers. Sweeping the heavens for interesting objects—with a six and one-fourth inch reflector of his own make—on the night of March 13, 1781, he observed a small, peculiar-looking coinetary object, as he thought, sea-green in color and with a hazy disk. Other objects besides planets have a disk-like appearance in the telescope, faint distant nebula as well as faint, tailless comets. It was nearly a year before Lexell established the fact that the object that Herschel had discovered and named Georgium Sidus, in honor of King George, was a new planet. It was moving in a nearly circular orbit at a distance from the sun almost exactly twice that of Saturn, which, up to that time, was believed to he the most distant of the planets.

Many names were considered for this new world, but that suggested by the astronomer, Bode, was finally adopted. Although the mean distance of Uranus from the sun is 1,785,800,000 miles, its actual distance varies 84000.000 miles from the mean on either side. It moves in its orbit at the leisurely rate of four and one-fourth miles a second, and takes 84 years to complete one trip around the sun. It now lacks three years of completing two revolutions since the day of its discovery. The diameter of Uranus is about 32,000 miles. Its disk is decidedly elliptical in shape and sea-green in color. Its cold atmosphere has revealed, spectroscopically, the presence of methane and ammonia. Heavy bands in the red, orange and green are due to the presence of methane in sufficient quantities to produce a layer four miles deep. The planet's mass has been very accurately determined, and is equal to fifteen times that of the earth.

By: davidbunch

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

Other articles: Disney movie scripts Disney Movie Quotes Disney movie auditions