Uranus was originally called “George’s Star” (Georgium Sidus).

There was an 18th century German musician, William Herschel, who made his home in England, in Bath in fact. He became interested in astronomy, but found that telescopes at that time were expensive and not very good anyway, so he made his own. He set about finding double stars, which meant looking at thousands of stars to see if they were one point of light or two. Then he came across one which showed a tiny disc rather than a point of light. It turned out to be the planet we now call Uranus.

Initially he wanted to call the star Georgium Sidus, or George’s Star, because the king at the time was King George III, you know, the one who went mad, who was fellow Hanoverian. But this didn’t go down too well with foreign astronomers.

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