Discoveries
- Independently discovered the Great Comet of 1811
- Bond and his son George Phillips Bond discovered Saturn's moon Hyperion; it was independently co-discovered at the same time by William Lassell in Britain, and both are given credit.
- Father and son were the first to observe the then innermost ring of Saturn, termed the Crepe ring when they pointed Harvard’s telescope towards Saturn in 1850.
- Working with John Adams Whipple, the Bonds pioneered astrophotography, taking the first daguerreotype image of a star (Vega, in 1850) ever taken from America. In all, the threesome took between 200 and 300 photos of celestial objects.
Read more about this topic: William Cranch Bond
Famous quotes containing the word discoveries:
“The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Furnished as all Europe now is with Academies of Science, with nice instruments and the spirit of experiment, the progress of human knowledge will be rapid and discoveries made of which we have at present no conception. I begin to be almost sorry I was born so soon, since I cannot have the happiness of knowing what will be known a hundred years hence.”
—Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)
“Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)