^* . . . though some in Europe might well rather cite Herschel. Few today can possibly gainsay the astronomical achievements of this remarkable telescope-wielding family, three generations descended from an oboe-playing soldier and former gardener from Germany, but who themselves fled to and settled and performed most of their stargazing in England. William and Caroline Herschel, siblings, were the first to win fame—he for discovering the planet Uranus in 1781; she—hitherto a quite uneducated maidservant—for helping her brother discover more than a score of comets and some twenty-five hundred nebulae. The image of the pair spending nights grinding and polishing lenses and mirrors to such a degree of precision as was attainable in the mid-eighteenth century lingers still in the annals of astronomy’s charms. William’s son, John Herschel, was to become so revered a scientist—polymathic but supreme in sky-searching—that he was buried in Westminster Abbey beside Sir Isaac Newton (the common man may bless him for his interest in cameras, and his invention of the terms positive, negative, snap-shot, and photographer). He was also happily fertile: his fifth child (of twelve) and second son, Alexander, was himself no mean astronomer, and would become a professor, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a leading authority on meteorites.