The first planet to be discovered with the telescope and the seventh in the order of distance from the Sun. It was found accidentally by W. Herschel in England on March 13, 1781. Herschel's home-made telescope was good enough to show that this object was not starlike; Uranus appeared as a fuzzy patch of light, not a point. At first he thought it was a comet, but subsequent calculations of the orbit demonstrated that Uranus was actually a planet, about twice as far from the Sun as Saturn and therefore in an orbit that agreed almost exactly with the prediction of the Titius-Bode relation for planetary distances.