8:57 a.m., Oct. 9, 2009----One evening in the spring of 1781, William Herschel, a professional musician living in Bath, England, looked through his homemade telescope and saw an object he thought must be a comet. In fact, it was the planet Uranus -- the first planet ever discovered by an individual in human history.

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But this remarkable observation, which catapulted Herschel almost overnight into the ranks of the most accomplished and celebrated astronomers in the world, was by no means his biggest achievement in astronomy.

On Saturday, Oct. 17, at 7 p.m., in the Rodney Room of the University of Delaware's Perkins Student Center, science writer Michael Lemonick will provide a fascinating account of how a poor musician's observation led to a whole new world of scientific inquiry in “How William and Caroline Herschel Invented Modern Astronomy.”

The presentation is the latest offering in the Harcourt C. “Ace” Vernon Lecture Series, which is hosted by the Delaware Asteroseismic Research Center (DARC) at UD and sponsored by the Mt. Cuba Astronomical Observatory in Greenville, Del.

Named in honor of the late Vernon, who was the first chairman of the observatory's board of trustees, the series was established to celebrate the 2009 International Year of Astronomy.

Called “one of astronomy's great popularizers” by The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Lemonick has been a journalist and author for more than 25 years -- 20 of them at TIME Magazine, where he wrote more than 50 cover stories on topics ranging from climate change to genomics to particle physics. Today, he teaches writing at Princeton University and is the senior staff writer for Climate Central.

Lemonick has written four books on astronomy: The Light at the Edge of the Universe (1993); Other Worlds (1996), which won the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award; Echo of the Big Bang (2003); and The Georgian Star (2008), which focuses on the Herschels and their discoveries.

Lemonick holds an A.B. in economics from Harvard College and an M.S. in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

The lecture is free and open to the public. Reservations are requested, but not required. Register online at the DARC Web site.

The final lecture in the series, “Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe” by noted astronomer Alex Filippenko, will be held Saturday, Nov. 7, at 7 p.m., at the Clayton Hall Conference Center.