Hmmm... Very interesting! I hope that someone has checked the Babylonian & Egyptian records -- they were apparently very, very good. Perhaps they did discover Uranus. Although I would imagine that such a discovery would have been considered very important, and therefore been widely disseminated. On the other hand, the Zoroastrians (another group that studied star charts religiously(!) ) were pretty secretive about their findings. By the way, the plaza in front of the new cathedral in downtown Los Angeles _is_ a star chart -- it records the positions of a number of stars and planets on the day that it was consecrated about a year ago. Too bad that the haze & smog of L.A. makes it impossible to compare using the naked eye! At 10:37 PM 10/31/03 -0800, John McCarthy wrote:
Here's another example of something that was never done, although it could have been. Uranus is visible with the naked eye and therefore could have been discovered to be a planet.
In fact it was discovered by Herschel in 1751 who was making a new star catalog and compared his catalog with a previous one prepared by Flamsteed. One star had moved substantially between catalogs and proved to be a planet. Herschel wanted to name it Georgius after the king, but a Greek god was more suitable.
He used a telescope, but it wasn't essential, but the cataloging was.