The Herschels of Hanover / Michael Hoskin.

An account of the life and family of William Herschel, covering his parents, siblings and children. Gives a short biography of each. Mainly focused on the career of William who was a musician before becoming a royal astronomer to the court of King George III. He had many talents in building instruments, collecting data and applying formal methodologies. One such approach was borrowed from Natural History: that of collected catalogues of specimens and deriving trends within a dataset. With this he studied double stars and nebulea. This was facilitated by the development of increasingly powerful telescopes, covered in this text. He also discovered Uranus and infrared light.