Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel was born on 15 November 1738 in Hanover, then a separate German state that shared its ruler with Great Britain, and trained first as a professional musician, moving to England as a young man and building a career as an organist and composer before astronomy, pursued initially as an amateur sideline, came to dominate his life entirely. He built his own telescopes, achieving a standard of optical quality that let him make observations well beyond the reach of most contemporary instruments, and in 1781 discovered the planet Uranus, the first planet identified since antiquity, an achievement that won him royal patronage and a full time astronomical career.
Herschel went on to catalog thousands of nebulae and double stars, working closely with his sister Caroline Herschel, herself a distinguished astronomer, and developed influential theories about the structure of the Milky Way and the nature of stars. He died on 25 August 1822, having spent more than four decades as Britain's most prominent observational astronomer.
His discovery of Uranus, initially reported as a comet before its planetary nature was confirmed, won Herschel the patronage of King George III, who appointed him King's Astronomer and granted him a royal pension that let him abandon his musical career entirely and devote himself full time to observational astronomy for the rest of his life, an unusually direct instance of royal patronage transforming an amateur into one of the era's most productive professional scientists.