William Cranch Bond

William Cranch Bond ( born September 9, 1789 in Falmouth, District of Maine, Mass. (now Portland, Maine), USA;. † 29 January 1859 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States) was an American astronomer. He discovered Hyperion, the eighth moon of the planet Saturn.

Bond was mainly self-taught watchmaker in Boston. In 1812 he was an avid amateur astronomer. In 1815 he traveled to study observatories, since he was planning a possible Observatory in Harvard to Europe.

In 1839 this observatory, the Harvard College Observatory, founded and Bond became its first director. In 1847, the observatory with a telescope aperture width 42.5 cm, which was the largest telescope in the world for the next twenty years. This Bond examined intensively sunspots, the Orion Nebula and Saturn. Together with his son George Phillips Bond, he discovered in 1848 - independently at the same time as the Englishman William Lassell - the moon Hyperion.

Bond was a pioneer of astrophotography. Together with John Adams Whipple in 1850 he made the first daguerreotype of a star, Vega. Bond and Whipple created also includes detailed photographs of the Moon.

After William Cranch Bond and his son George Phillips Bond of Bond crater is named. On Saturn 's moon Hyperion, a ridge was named after him. Furthermore, the asteroid ( 767 ) Bondia bears his name.