Royal Crescent

In the Royal Crescent, Bath, England, we see frost on and around the receding shadow of one of the houses that starred in some of Jane Austen's books. The seventh meeting on The Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena met in Bath in October 2010, honoring William Herschel, who discovered the planet Uranus from his house there in 1781, and his sister Caroline. Caroline, who went on to discover eight comets, was the first female to receive a stipend for doing science, and so might be thought of as the first professional female astronomer and the first professional female scientist. After William's discovery of Uranus, the King asked them to move close to Windsor so he could be the Royal Astronomer, showing celestial objects with his telescopes to the King's guests after dinner, and Caroline soon also got onto the Royal payroll. More photos can be viewed online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1119/1.3653553....