Stubbornness, stamina, boldness, and luck enabled William Herschel to connect our Universe with Newton's and Kant's speculations. Leaving Hanover in 1757 after the French occupation, he settled in England as an itinerant teacher, copier, and composer of music, becoming organist of the Octagon Chapel at Bath in 1766. But his real interest from childhood was astronomy. He privately built a succession of larger and larger reflecting telescopes and systematically swept the heavens. His sister, Caroline, emigrating in 1772, helped with these nightly observations, to the eventual destruction of her own singing career. In 1781, Herschel had the great luck to find Uranus, the first planet discovered since the days of the ancients, although he originally thought it was just a comet. Fame followed quickly, and fortune soon after when George III granted him a pension for life. He supplemented this by building small telescopes for sale (until his wealthy marriage in 1788) and became a full-time astronomer. Career paths, like the subject itself, have changed considerably since then.

For twenty years, starting in 1783, Herschel searched for nebulae with his 20-foot telescope and its 18 7/10 inch speculum mirror. Messier's catalog, available in 1781, had inspired him first to try to resolve known nebulae with his superior telescope, and then to discover more.