 |
| Umbriel |
 |
| Ariel |
– 1851
William
Lassell was apprenticed to a merchant in Liverpool, England, and then
he made a fortune as a beer brewer. But he is known for his hobby.
Some
hobby!
Lassell
was interested in astronomy, and, remember, he made a fortune, so he
had plenty of money. He was able to build an observatory near
Liverpool, and he himself ground and polished a 24-inch mirror for
its telescope. He was the first to use a particular “equatorial
mount” to easily track objects in the sky as the earth rotates.
(Remember, although all the stars and planets seem to cross the sky
as the night passes, it is really the earth spinning that creates
this apparent motion.)
Using his telescope, Lassell discovered Triton, the largest moon of Neptune—just 17 days
after Neptune itself was discovered! That was in 1846. In 1848, he
discovered Hyperion, a moon of Saturn (although on the same night,
another astronomer independently made the same discovery). Finally,
on this day in 1951, Lassell discovered two new moons of Uranus.
 |
| Uranus and its rings and moons... Its axis of rotation is tipped so that its north and south pole are where most planets' equators are... |
Uranus's
moons (we now know of 27!) are named after characters from the works
of Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. Ariel is a sky spirit in
Shakespeare's The
Tempest,
and Umbriel is a character in a poem by Alexander Pope.
By
the way...
In
case you think that William Lassell spent his entire fortune on
building an observatory and telescope...no, not so much. In 1855 he
built another telescope, this one twice as large, and had it
installed in Malta, in the Mediterranean, where the weather and
therefore skies are better for observation. When he died in 1880, he
still left a fortune equal to millions of U.S. dollars of today!
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