Meet the Herschels: the first modern astronomers

Guest Speaker

Thursday, 5th February 2026 (19:45 - 22:00)

Venue: Hybrid

A lot of what we think of as modern astronomy – survey science, the search for life on other planets, data science, to name a few – were pioneered more than 200 years ago by William and Caroline Herschel. In this talk I’ll explore how this provincial musician and his housekeeper sister became leading lights in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

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Speaker: Sue Bowler

Sue Bowler is Editor of the Royal Astronomical Society’s members magazine and an enthusiast for planetary (and exoplanetary) science. She worked at the Royal Greenwich Observatory before her degrees and afterwards in geosciences research before moving to New Scientist, where she took charge of the Earth, planets and heliosphere. She then taught at the University of Leeds for 20 years, while also editing science magazines and writing. She makes the most of the RAS community and meetings to keep abreast of astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, solid-Earth geophysics, solar-terrestrial, magnetospheric and ionospheric physics, data science, SETI, multimessenger observations.

Learn more about Sue Bowler