Sir William Herschel has at least two claims to fame. He is mainly remembered for the fact that that one night in 1781 he saw through his telescope "a star that appeared to be visibly larger than the rest". It turned out to be the planet that we now call Uranus.
Sir William had been born in Hanover in Germany, and came to England in 1757 where for some years he earned a precarious living as a music teacher and dabbled in astronomy. But his discovery of Uranus brought him almost instant fame, and his friends were able to lobby King George III to grant him a knighthood and a royal pension.
On receipt of his generous endowment, he moved to Windsor, where his only duty was to allow the royal family to look through his telescope whenever they might wish.
His good fortune was compounded in 1788 by marriage to a rich widow, who brought him financial security until his death in 1822.
But Sir William is also well known for having allegedly endorsed the view that the Moon affects our weather.
After years of careful study, he is said to have concluded that the character of the weather for the following seven days depends on the exact time that each of the four phases of the moon begins - the New Moon, the First Quarter, the Full Moon and the Last Quarter.
In wintertime, for example, if the phase in question begins between noon and 2 p.m., snow and rain will be frequent in the coming week; a change of phase occurring between 2 and 4 p.m., on the other hand, indicates fine but frosty weather.
In this way, Herschel carefully tabulated the significance of a lunar phase-change in each of the 12 two-hourly intervals of the day, and provided a similar tabulation for the summer months.
Now you might think that Sir William Herschel ought to have known better than to think that the moon has any influence whatever on the weather. And so, it seems, he did. In a letter to a learned journal, dated February 6th, 1814, he writes:
"Sir,
"I am glad of the opportunity to say that the prognostications of the weather are so much above the knowledge of astronomers that I have taken the uncommon pains publicly to contradict reports of predictions that have been ascribed to me. You may therefore be assured that what you have heard of my opinion about the frost is without the smallest foundation."
The italics, of course, and therefore the opinion they imply, are entirely Sir William Herschel's, and not mine.