William Herschel

The weather forecast for our last day in Bath was for lots of rain, so we decided to make it a museum day.
 
There's a pretty wide choice of smallish museums here: we chose the William Herschel Museum in the morning and the "Bath at Work" museum in the afternoon.
 
I'd vaguely heard of Herschel before but didn't know much about him. Having arrived in the UK from Hanover aged 19 in 1757, without much money but as an talented musician, he ended up being an eminent astronomer  with an amazing talent for designing and manufacturing telescopes. He's particularly famous for discovering the planet Uranus on 13 March 1781 and thereby doubling the known size of the solar system. His sister Caroline was a very able assistant and one of the early well-accomplished women of science.
 
Although his later work was performed in Slough, near Windsor Castle (so that King George III could use his telescopes) his early work was conducted from his house in Bath which is now the museum of his work.
 
Today's blip photo is of a "Dolls' House" replica of Herschel's house which is in the museum: my Editor, who likes dolls' houses, was rather taken with it as the walls could be hinged open to reveal the inside as you can see in the photo. You can see her and Son #2 peering behind it, as the wall for the middle section opens at the back!
 
(As a Geordie, I was interested to find that Herschel moved to Sunderland in 1761, 4 years after his arrival in the UK, when Charles Avison engaged him as first violin and soloist for his Newcastle orchestra, where he played for one season.)