Neptune was found not by anyone scanning the night sky but by mathematics — Urbain Le Verrier noticed Uranus being tugged off its predicted path, worked out where the hidden planet had to be, and astronomers in Berlin who pointed a telescope at that patch of sky found Neptune within a degree of his prediction that same night.

On the night of 23 September 1846, an astronomer at the Berlin Observatory pointed a telescope at a particular patch of sky, compared what he saw against a star chart, and found a planet that no chart recorded. It was Neptune. He found it within a degree of a position that had been worked out, […] The post Neptune was found not by anyone scanning the night sky but by mathematics — Urbain Le Verrier noticed Uranus being tugged off its predicted path, worked out where the hidden planet had to be, and astronomers in Berlin who pointed a telescope at that patch of sky found Neptune within a degree of his prediction that same night. appeared first on Space Daily .