“I compared it to H Geminorum and the small star in the quartile between Auriga and Gemini, and finding it so much larger than either of them, suspected it to be a comet.”

His discovery of Uranus. Scientific Papers, vol. 1, page 30 "Account of a Comet".

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I compared it to H Geminorum and the small star in the quartile between Auriga and Gemini, and finding it so much large…" by William Herschel?
William Herschel photo
William Herschel 36
German-born British astronomer, technical expert, and compo… 1738–1822

Related quotes

Brandon Mull photo
Julius Caesar photo

“I will not … that my wife be so much as suspected.”

Julius Caesar (-100–-44 BC) Roman politician and general

His declaration as to why he had divorced his wife Pompeia, when questioned in the trial against Publius Clodius Pulcher for sacrilege against Bona Dea festivities (from which men were excluded), in entering Caesar's home disguised as a lute-girl apparently with intentions of a seducing Caesar's wife; as reported in Plutarch's Lives of Coriolanus, Caesar, Brutus, and Antonius by Plutarch, as translated by Thomas North, p. 53
Variant translations:
Caesar's wife must be above suspicion.

William Herschel photo

“The starlike appearance of the following six nebulæ is so considerable that the best description… was to compare them to stars with certain deficiencies.”

William Herschel (1738–1822) German-born British astronomer, technical expert, and composer

Astronomical Observations relating to the Construction of the Heavens... (1811)
Context: The starlike appearance of the following six nebulæ is so considerable that the best description... was to compare them to stars with certain deficiencies.<!-- p. 328

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. photo

“Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) United States Supreme Court justice

"The Path of the Law," Address to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts at the dedication of the new hall of the Boston University School of Law (8 January 1897), published in Harvard Law Review, Vol. 10 (25 March 1897).
1890s

John Archibald Wheeler photo
J. Howard Moore photo
Robert Frost photo
Jan Oort photo

“From a score of well-observed original orbits it is shown that the "new" long-period comets generally come from regions between about 50000 and 150000 A. U. distance. The sun must be surrounded by a general cloud of comets with a radius of this order, containing about 1011 comets of observable size; the total mass of the cloud is estimated to be of the order of 1/10 to 1/100 of that of the earth. Through the action of the stars fresh comets are continually being carried from this cloud into the vicinity of the sun.”

Jan Oort (1900–1992) Dutch astronomer

[The structure of the cloud of comets surrounding the Solar System and a hypothesis concerning its origin, Bulletin of the Astronomical Institutes of the Netherlands, 11, 408, 91–110, 3 January 1950, 91, https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/6036/BAN_11_91_110.pdf?sequence=1]

Jan Oort photo

“The combined effects of the stars and of Jupiter appear to determine the main statistical features of the orbits of comets.”

Jan Oort (1900–1992) Dutch astronomer

[The structure of the cloud of comets surrounding the Solar System and a hypothesis concerning its origin, Bulletin of the Astronomical Institutes of the Netherlands, 11, 408, 91–110, 3 January 1950, 91, https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/6036/BAN_11_91_110.pdf?sequence=1]

Related topics