Hershel was a fascinating person. He was a composer of some note, compared favorably with Mozart when he got the astronomy bug in the 1770's. He, along with others, had the idea that if you can find very close pairs of stars in the sky, and observer them from wildly different places on earth, you can use parallax to figure out how far away they are. Eventually, this would show the first results with a star called 61 Cygni roughly 10.3 light years away from us.

And for the few people left who say women can't do science, his sister Caroline was an amazing observational astronomer and mathematician in her own right with multiple discoveries to her credit.

When you see on the news that the Hubble, etc took a picture of an object that is listed as NGC and a number, that is the catalog that came out of William Herschel's observations and his and his sisters obsessive note taking at about the time that the USA was becoming a country.