At the death of his father in 1822, John Herschel, with his tastes already formed for a scientific career, found himself in the possession of ample means.  To him also passed all his father’s great telescopes and apparatus.  These material aids, together with a dutiful sense of filial obligation, decided him to make practical astronomy the main work of his life.  He decided to continue to its completion that great survey of the heavens which had already been inaugurated, and, indeed, to a large extent accomplished, by his father.

The first systematic piece of practical astronomical work which John Herschel undertook was connected with the measurement of what are known as “Double Stars.”  It should be observed, that there are in the heavens a number of instances in which two stars are seen in very close association.  In the case of those objects to which the expression “Double Stars” is generally applied, the two luminous points are so close together that even though they might each be quite bright enough to be visible to the unaided eye, yet their proximity is such that they cannot be distinguished as two separate objects without optical aid.  The two stars seem fused together into one.  In the telescope, however, the bodies may be discerned separately, though they are frequently so close together that it taxes the utmost power of the instrument to indicate the division between them.

The appearance presented by a double star might arise from the circumstance that the two stars, though really separated from each other by prodigious distances, happened to lie nearly in the same line of vision, as seen from our point of view.  No doubt, many of the so-called double stars could be accounted for on this supposition.  Indeed, in the early days when but few double stars were known, and when telescopes were not powerful enough to exhibit the numerous close doubles which have since been brought to light, there seems to have been a tendency to regard all double stars as merely such perspective effects.  It was not at first suggested that there could be any physical connection between the components of each pair.  The appearance presented was regarded as merely due to the circumstance that the line joining the two bodies happened to pass near the earth.

[Plate:  Sir John Herschel.]

In the early part of his career, Sir William Herschel seems to have entertained the view then generally held by other astronomers with regard to the nature of these stellar pairs.  The great observer thought that the double stars could therefore be made to afford a means of solving that problem in which so many of the observers of the skies had been engaged, namely, the determination of the distances of the stars from the earth.  Herschel saw that the displacement of the earth in its annual movement round the sun would produce an apparent shift in the place of the nearer of the two stars relatively to the other, supposed to be much more remote.  If this shift could be measured, then the distance of the nearer of the stars could be estimated with some degree of precision.