William Herschel discovered Uranus — Flamsteed saw it first

Uranus was discovered by William Herschel, a German-born musician and amateur astronomer, shortly before midnight on 13 March 1781, from the back garden of his home in Bath, England. It was the first new planet found since antiquity.

Others saw it first

Herschel was not the first person to look at Uranus, only the first to recognise it. The planet sits on the edge of naked-eye visibility, and in 1690 England’s first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, entered it in his star catalogue as 34 Tauri. He logged it again in 1712 and 1715, and his successor James Bradley recorded it in 1748, 1750 and 1753. No one realised these “fixed stars” were the same object, wandering across the sky.

What Herschel had was optics. His homemade 6.2-inch reflecting telescope, better than any instrument available to the Astronomer Royal, showed the object, by then in Gemini, as a small disc rather than a point. Even so, he first reported it as a comet.

Confirmation needed outside help. The Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne asked astronomers across Europe to follow it, and calculations showing a near-circular orbit, with no tail, settled that it was a planet circling the Sun at about twice Saturn’s distance. The find doubled the size of the known solar system.

Rewards followed fast. The Royal Society gave Herschel its Copley Medal in November 1781, and in July 1782 he became King’s Astronomer to George III, letting him give up music for the sky. He wanted to call the planet Georgium Sidus (George’s Star), but astronomers abroad preferred Uranus, proposed by Johann Bode in 1782. It remains the only planet named after a Greek god rather than a Roman one.