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Person

William Herschel

A portrait depicts William Herschel, wearing a dark coat with a white ruffled cravat, set against a dark background.

German-born British astronomer (1738–1822) best known for discovering Uranus in 1781. In 1800, while measuring the temperature of sunlight passed through a prism, he detected heat beyond the red end of the visible spectrum — the first evidence of infrared radiation. He also catalogued more than 2,400 deep-sky objects and built the largest reflecting telescopes of his era, ground and polished by hand.

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