Sometimes a photograph of a celestial object is a reminder of the pioneer(s) that discovered it. Few such stories are as inspiring as that of the Herschels. They were pioneers of the systematic classification and investigation of the heavens. William Herschel was one of the first 'professional' astronomers, and discovered infrared radiation. His sister Caroline helped him to develop the modern mathematical approach to astronomy. Please allow me to tell a bit of their story.
Picture this; The year is 1738(!) when William Herschel, son of a musician, was born in Hanover, Germany. He followed in his father's footsteps, joining the Hanoverian Guard band to play the oboe, but moved to England to teach music in 1755, eventually settling in Bath in 1766.
At some point this musician expanded on his interests in astronomy and started to build his own telescopes. He developed and refined Isaac Newton‘s designs to avoid problems with poor glass optics. Herschel cast and polished his own mirrors, producing ever bigger and better telescopes. In 1772, he invited his sister Caroline to join him as his assistant. She moved to Bath and soon found herself equally captivated by the night sky. In 1781, while working alone, William discovered the planet Uranus. He originally named it 'Georgium Sidus' in honour of the British King.
The discovery of the new planet inspired Herschel to cease his career as a musician and teacher and concentrate solely on astronomy. King George III appointed William his private astronomer in 1782, and the Herschels moved to Slough, near Windsor, England. His paper 'On the Construction of the Heavens', published in 1784, modelled the formation of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, and marked the beginnings of Herschel's life-long interest in the cataloguing of the Universe.
By 1789, Herschel had built a 12-metre-long reflector, the largest telescope of its day (see picture). Meanwhile in 1786 Caroline had become the first woman to discover a comet, finding seven more in the years between up to 1797, and she also discovered three nebulae of which the current photograph of NGC 7380 (aka The Wizard Nebula) was one.
It took the best telescope and one of the sharpest minds of it's time using an absolute beast of a telescope with an aperture of 1200mm and a focal length of 12000mm (F/10) to see a faint smudge.
238 years later it took my 115mm aperture apochromatic triplet telescope with 632mm of focal length (F/5.5) 75 exposures of 180 seconds (and the necessary post-processing) to produce this extremely detailed and colorful photograph.
Just to imagine, what if we could have shown her (and her brother) this photograph and share our current understanding of it?
I'm happy to stand on the shoulders of such giants!