Sir John Herschel (1792-1871)

John Frederick William Herschel was the only child of William Herschel and Mary Pitt. He was born at their observatory home near Windsor, England. He was the top mathematician to graduate from Cambridge in 1813 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in May the same year. In 1816, he left the university to join his father in astronomy and began to study double stars although he kept up his other interests. He was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1821 and his work on double stars earned him the first of his three Gold Medals from the Astronomical Society of London in 1826. He was knighted in 1831. In 1833 he took his family to South Africa for four years and mapped the southern sky to match his father's catalogues of northern nebulae, star clusters and double stars. He also produced results that contributed to photography, taking the first photograph to be developed on glass of his father's 40-foot telescope. He coined the terms “snap-shot”, positive and negative.¹⁾

Captain John Franklin named Herschel Island during his second arctic expedition of 1825-27. Franklin lived next door to John Herschel in London, but it is possible that he wished to commemorate the entire family. In the late 1800s, whaling in the Beaufort Sea led to an influx of American vessels that wintered at Pauline Cove on what the families who hunted and fished there called Qikiqtaruq. Qikiqtaruk is now a Yukon Park, established in 1987 under the Inuvialuit Final Agreement Land Claim.²⁾