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The ruinous mansion at Datchet having become uninhabitable, even by astronomers, their establishment was shifted, in June, 1785, to Clay Hall, near Old Windsor. Here the long-thought-of forty-foot was begun, but was not destined to be finished. A litigious landlady intervened. The next move, however, proved to be the last. It was to a commodious residence at Slough, now called “Observatory House”—“le lieu du monde,” wrote Arago, “où il a été fait le plus de découvertes.” Thither, without the loss of an hour, in April, 1786, the machinery and apparatus collected at Clay Hall were transported. Yet, “amidst all this hurrying business,” Caroline remembered “that every moment after daylight was allotted to observing. The last night at Clay Hall was spent in sweeping till daylight, and by the next evening the telescope stood ready for observation at Slough.”

During the ensuing three months, thirty to forty workmen were constantly employed, “some in felling and rooting out trees, some in digging and preparing the ground for the bricklayers who were laying the foundation for the telescope.” “A whole troop of labourers” were, besides, engaged in reducing “the iron tools to a proper shape for the mirror to be ground upon.” Thus, each morning, when dawn compelled Herschel to desist from observation, he found a bevy of people awaiting instructions of all sorts from him. “If it had not been,” his sister says, “for the intervention of a cloudy or moonlit night, I know not when he, or I either, should have got any sleep.” The wash-house was turned into a forge for the manufacture of specially designed tools; heavy articles cast in London were brought by water to Windsor; the library was so encumbered with stores, models, and implements, that “no room for a desk or an atlas remained.”