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When Caroline Herschel was born in 1750, no one guessed she’d become a famous scientist, least of all her mother, Anna. Caroline’s father, Isaac Herschel, was a pretty ordinary musician in Hanover, in what is now Germany. He was a man who dreamed of better things and did his best to educate his children, but he was hampered by a lack of funds and a wife who didn’t have the same goal. Caroline learned no music and no French, so she couldn’t become a governess. As for getting married, that seemed unlikely. She didn’t come with money or beauty. She was very, very short (under five feet). Also, she had a bout with smallpox that left her face scarred (Hoskin, 1).

The most likely scenario was that Caroline would be household help for her parents until they died, and for one of her brothers afterwards until she died. But that was not how it turned out. Her older brother William went to England to pursue a musical career of his own, and he invited her to come and try to become a singer there. The idea of Caroline making a career on the stage as a very short, pocked woman who didn’t speak English (or French or Italian) was maybe a long shot, but Caroline jumped at the chance for adventure. She arrived in England in 1772 at the age of 22.

Her destination city was Bath, and it was also a regular destination for England’s elite from autumn until Easter every year. That was why a musician like William could find ready work during those months. He taught lessons, performed on multiple instruments, and composed. Some of his compositions still exist.

The catch with Caroline having a career in singing was that she didn’t have any training as singer. But William was happy to share his expertise, on singing, and on English, and on mathematics. The mathematics had a purpose because while William was certainly helping his sister out by giving her a place to go and a more exciting life than she had dreamed of, there was no denying that he was getting something out of it too. Caroline would be managing his household and his accounts just as soon as he could teach her how to do it. He was very generous in some ways, but not necessarily the best teacher. Caroline often felt herself to be on uncertain ground because “my dear brother, William, was my only teacher and we generally began with what we should have ended” (Lubbock, 50; Hoskin, 25).

Even so, she learned. She did manage the household and the accounts for years to come. She copied parts for singers and instrumentalists. She trained the choruses. She sang some solos. She sang so well that she was offered a job in Birmingham. She turned it down because it would mean leaving William, whose career was bound up in Bath (Hoskin, 37-38).

Astronomy Enters the Household

Meanwhile William was developing a new non-musical passion. He stayed up late in the evenings reading books on astronomy and lectured Caroline about it over breakfast. One time a student came to the house for a lesson. He was singing in fine form and felt gratified when William said “Beautiful! Beautiful!” Only a few minutes later, the student realized William was not talking about the singing. He was looking at a planet visible in the night sky through the open window (Hoskin, 35).

When the frantic season of Bath entertainment ended and the aristocrats all left town, William occupied himself with learning how to build telescopes. He joined the Bath Philosophical Society and listed his profession as optical instrument maker and mathematician, which is called fake-it-til-you-make-it because those were definitely not his professions. He wrote and delivered papers about this work, and some were forwarded on to the Royal Society in London and published. He was gaining a name for himself, and it wasn’t as a musician (Hoskin, 45).

William started cataloging all the double stars he could find, and in 1781, he discovered a planet. No one in recorded history had done that. All the planets you can see with the naked eye had been known by multiple cultures since antiquity. But William Herschel found Uranus in his homemade telescope. From that moment he was internationally famous.

As the discoverer, William had a big say in naming his new planet, and Uranus was not his choice. It was standard practice, for both musicians and astronomers, to name their great works after the reigning monarch. This was a little hint to say: please accept this gift, your majesty, and in return for my sycophancy, give me a job with a generous lifetime pension, please. So for a while there, the known planets were Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and … George (Hoskin, 51-66).

That’s right, George the planet was named for George III of England. He’s the same George who is infamous in my own country as the tyrant mentioned in our Declaration of Independence. As I’ve said before, that was a little unfair. George III wasn’t that bad as kings go.

He certainly wasn’t that bad to astronomers. William Herschel’s plan worked. The king offered him a position as astronomer near Windsor castle. William was to build telescopes, observe, and provide demonstrations for all the king’s visiting aristocrats.

Caroline Becomes an Astronomer (against her will)

So, it was time for Caroline to move. Up until this point, her role in William’s little hobby was to listen to his bubbling enthusiasm and to try to keep a house that was rapidly filling up with lenses, mirrors, polishing tools, etc.

This move was not her idea of an exciting new future. The new house was a leaky one in a tiny crime-filled village with little social life, no musical possibilities, and a decrease in William’s salary. But what could she do? She was financially dependent and she went.

William had plans for his little sister. Caroline had been his assistant in music, and he saw no reason why that fundamental position should change. She was delivered to the new home to make it fit for habitation while he went back to Bath to collect the rest of their belongings. She wrote that she was:

“left solely to confuse myself with my own thoughts, which were anything else than cheerful; for I found I was to be trained for an assistant Astronomer; and by way of encouragement a Telescope … was given to me. I was to sweep for comets, and … I began August 22, 1782, to write down and describe remarkable appearances… But it was not till the last two months of the same year before I felt the least encouragement for spending the starlight nights on a grass-plot covered by dew or hoar frost without a human being near enough to be within call” (Lubbock, 149-150; Hoskin, 82).

It was a rough beginning, but Caroline found herself equal to the task. She found a nebula on her second night. She found another one shortly afterwards, and it wasn’t in any of the existing lists. She found fourteen by the end of the year, and they weren’t even what she was originally set to look for. William was thrilled. He hurriedly switched to looking for nebulae himself (Hoskin, 82-91).

But William was also getting frustrated with the limitations of his setup. To look in the telescope, he needed to be outside in the dark. His eyes would adjust to the dark and that was good because then he could look through the telescope. But to record his observations, he then had to pull away from the telescope, light an artificial light source, wait for his eyes to adjust, write it all down, turn out the light, return to the telescope and wait for his eyes to adjust again. All astronomers face the problem of limited time when conditions are right, and Great Britain has more cloud cover than many other places. It was infuriating to spend so much of the good time waiting for his eyes to adjust.

The system he and Caroline worked out was to make it a true partnership. In general, he stood outside at the telescope. She sat inside where it was warmer and a candle gave her light. He would shout his observations down to her through an open window. She wrote it all down, checked his observations against the existing catalogs, and organized the results (Hoskin, 93).

I want to stress that there was nothing trivial about this work. There is a tendency to think, “oh, it was just secretarial, and William did the real work.” That would be absolutely false on multiple grounds. For one thing, Caroline was sometimes the one at the telescope. For another thing, she was not simply writing words by dictation. She was making calculations, correlating with existing charts, and noting errors. It was highly skilled labor. And still another thing is that looking through a telescope may be fun, but it’s useless science without the record. Caroline’s contribution was absolutely essential.

Together, the Herschel siblings turned out stunning amounts of work. They already had Messier’s famous catalog of nebulae and star clusters. Messier listed just over 100 of these objects. The Herschels together added 2,510. This was in addition to entertaining an endless stream of aristocratic visitors eager to look through the telescopes.

One thing that I do appreciate about William is that he never tried to hide Caroline’s involvement. Many accomplished men had female coworkers, but often all the credit goes to the accomplished man as if he did all the work himself. Caroline was known even at the time. It’s true that she was viewed as an assistant, but she was an assistant who was in touch with many of the great men of science in England. She wrote to them directly. They knew her.

Caroline Becomes Professional

William coaxed the king into funding a bigger and better telescope. Then he coaxed the king into providing yet more funds when the project inevitably ran over budget. In that second round of funding, William also did something unheard of, but it warms my heart. He told the king that Caroline needed her own salary. Most women were financially dependent on their husbands, fathers, or (in this case) brothers. As the manager of William’s household, it was of course expected that he would pay for her expenses, and he had. In asking for a separate salary, William was recognizing that Caroline deserved more than that. He did not ask for his own salary to increase and then give her a higher allowance. That would have left him just as in charge as he always had been. Instead he asked for the Crown to give Caroline a regular salary so she could count on her own money.

The king was not best pleased with this request. It wasn’t the part about Caroline that displeased him, but all the other expenses on top of it when he thought he’d already paid for this new, bigger telescope. But he grumpily agreed. Caroline was paid £50 per year for life.

According to some sources, this salary makes Caroline woman in England to hold a government position. I’m unclear what definition they are using for “government position.” England had certainly been ruled by women before. (That seems to me to be a government position.) Also they had hired women before in a variety of capacities. Even as spies: see episode 8.2 on Aphra Behn.

I’m a lot more convinced by the claim that Caroline was the first female salaried scientist. At this point, science was mostly an unpaid gentleman’s hobby. Something you do if you’re interested and you have plenty of time because you don’t need to stress about earning money. A minority of scientists were paid, but as part of a professorship. You were really being paid to teach. Caroline was hired to do pure research. I’m unaware of any woman before her to claim that honor.

Caroline, Discoverer of Comets

Besides her work in conjunction with William, Caroline also observed on her own when he was out of town, which was increasingly frequent. On August 1, 1786, William was away from home, and Caroline wrote in her journal:

August 1: “I have calculated 100 nebulae today, and this evening I saw an object which I believe will prove tomorrow night to be a comet.”

August 2: “Today I calculated 150 nebulae… 1 o’clock; the object of last night is a comet.”

August 3: “I did not go to rest till I had wrote to Dr Blagden and Mr Aubert to announce the comet” (Lubbock, 153).

This last bit is important. Many a woman in science made discoveries but had them announced by men, who took all the credit. Dr Blagden was the secretary of the Royal Society of Astronomers. He knew Caroline. He did not think it strange or unbelievable that she would write to him directly or that she had discovered a comet on her own.

He wrote back “I believe the comet has not yet been seen by anyone in England but yourself. Yesterday the Visitation of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich was held, here most of the principal astronomers in and near London attended, which afforded an opportunity of spreading the news of your discovery” (Lubbock, 154).

Mr. Alexander Aubert was a businessman who pursued astronomy as a gentleman’s hobby, and he also was delighted with Caroline’s news. He responded even more warmly, “I wish you joy most sincerely for the discovery. I am more pleased than you can well conceive that you have made it… You have immortalized your name” (Lubbock, 155).

Caroline went on to find seven more comets between 1786 and 1797. Most of them had never before been recorded by anyone, and they made her famous across Europe. Even so, she was still hampered by being a woman, and I am sorry to say that some of the hampering was internal. For example, in 1797, she saddled a horse and rode to Greenwich to deliver news of her eighth comet. She was urged to also go call on Sir Joseph Banks in London, but her ingrained sense of how a woman behaves revolted. She couldn’t do it. She said, “I thought a woman who knows so little of the world ought not to aim at such an honour, but go home, where she ought to be, as soon as possible” (Hoskin, 142).

I am sighing a little here: Had she been a man, I don’t think she would have worried about calling on a gentleman at his home.

Caroline, Published Scientist

Both of the Herschels had always checked their observations against Flamsteed’s 1725 catalog of stars. Flamsteed was the absolute authority, and for a long time William and Caroline assumed his catalog was perfect. If they found discrepancies in position or brightness, then it must be that the star had moved or changed its brightness or whatever. But eventually they realized that perhaps Flamsteed was simply wrong. It happens.

Determining exactly where Flamsteed was wrong was complicated by the fact that he described his observations in volume two, and he catalogued his stars in volume 3. There was no way to correlate between the two volumes. William suggested that it would be a lot easier if there were an index. So Caroline made one. This was a massive job in a world without AI, without a search function, without computers of any kind. She did every single line of this index by hand, and she did an excellent job. She also listed hundreds of errors in Flamsteed’s data and added 500 stars he had overlooked.

The Royal Society of Astronomers was deeply impressed. So much so that they printed her catalog at their own expense (Hoskin, 143).

This, plus their publication of her comet announcement, makes Caroline Herschel the first woman to have a scientific publication with a major scientific entity. She was delighted. She wrote back to Dr. Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal, that:

“your having thought it worthy of the press has flattered my vanity not a little. You see, Sir, I do own myself to be vain because I would not wish to be singular, and was there ever a woman without vanity?—or a man either? Only with this difference, that among gentlemen the commodity is generally stiled ambition” (Lubbock, 257).

(Stiled in that context means “called” or “described.” She is saying that because she is a woman, her pleasure in her accomplishment is called vanity, and that’s a negative quality. If she were a man, the same feeling would be called ambition, and that’s a positive quality. And I’m pretty sure she’s right about this one.)

Trouble at Home

As well as the career was going, there was other trouble afoot. It was not in the skies. It was decidedly more terrestrial and mundane. William got married, and Caroline was dethroned as the longtime manager of his household. We don’t have Caroline’s exact feelings on this subject for the simple reason that she destroyed her journals from this period. This is an everlasting frustration to historians. Don’t destroy your journals, folks! We don’t care if you proved yourself to be human by saying something petty and mean. Who among us hasn’t said something petty and mean at some point?

Anyway, what we know is that Caroline used her salary from the Crown to rent her own lodgings for the first time in her life. She didn’t have to do that; there was still room for her in the house, but she did. This was not supposed to interrupt the working partnership she had with William, but of course it did interrupt it. Astronomical observation is totally dependent on unpredictable and quickly changing weather conditions. If you don’t get out while the weather’s good, you’ve missed the moment. It’s hard to do if your partner lives a mile away and there isn’t any mechanized transportation anyway.

Also, William was sort of losing steam. He had a wife. Soon he had a son named John. He had money to travel. He still had a constant stream of visitors.

Caroline’s Legacy

Caroline’s best observing days were simply behind her, whether she wanted them to be or not. But she wasn’t done with contributing to the field. John was born fairly late in William’s life and did not initially plan on being an astronomer. By the time the plans were revised, William was in his 80s, and Caroline was in her 70s. Nevertheless, they mounted the telescopes to teach John how to sweep the skies.

When William died not much later, Caroline chose to move back to Hanover, Germany, where she still had other siblings. But she was still in touch with her nephew John. When he mentioned that her catalogue of nebulae would be more useful to him if it were organized by position in the sky, just as someone sweeping the skies would encounter them, Caroline said, yes, you’re right. And she reorganized the entire catalog by hand. That’s 104 published pages of numbers done painstakingly while she was in her seventies (Hoskin, 104).

And she wasn’t forgotten by the European community of scientists. In 1828, the Royal Astronomical Society awarded her their Gold Medal. No woman would get it again until 1996 (Royal Astronomical Society). In 1832, the Danish king gave Caroline a medal. In 1835, the Royal Astronomical Society elected Caroline as a member. She was one of two women elected that year, and together they were the first female members. In 1838, she was given the same honor by the Royal Irish Academy (Hoskin, 200).

Unfortunately, Caroline was growing older and more cantankerous. She was particularly ungrateful for the Danish medal. “It provokes me beyond all endurance,” she wrote, “for it is of no use to me” (Hoskin, 200). All I can say is, medals usually aren’t much use to anyone. That’s why cash is better.

Caroline was 98 years old when John sent her his magnum opus. William and Caroline had catalogued and defined the northern skies. John had traveled to South Africa and done the same for the southern skies. Between them, the three Herschels mapped the heavens.

To this day, astronomers refer to nebulae, star clusters, and galaxies by their NGC numbers. NGC stands for New General Catalogue. That designation came from a published work by a Danish astronomer in 1888. It was new because he started with a solid core of catalogued objects already. He was just adding the discoveries and corrections found in the decades since Caroline Herschel created her ground-breaking catalogues.

Today I have a very big thank you to Kathy, who signed up as a supporter on Patreon and also made a one-time donation on Buy Me a Coffee. It’s a small but much appreciated group of people who have do both of those things. If you would able to do either or both, it really helps keep this project alive!

Selected Sources

Armstrong, Mabel. Women Astronomers : Reaching for the Stars. Marcola, Ore.: Stone Pine Press, 2008.

Hoskin, Michael. Discoverers of the Universe: William and Caroline Herschel. Princeton University Press, 2011.

Lubbock, Constance A. The Herschel Chronicle. The Life-Story of William Herschel and His Sister Caroline Herschel. [Consisting for the Most Part of Extracts from Their Autobiographical Notes and Journals and from Their Correspondence.] Edited by His Granddaughter C.A. Lubbock. [with Plates, Including Portraits.]. The Macmillan Company, 1933.

Masters, Karen. The Astronomers’ Library. Liber Historica, 2024.

Royal Astronomical Society. “The Gold Medal,” 2025. https://ras.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2025-03/Gold%20Medal%20winners%20-%20updated%202025_0.pdf.