by Henry Percy's cousin Thomas Percy. The Duke was surrounded by many scholars and learned men and provided a more stable form of patronage than Raleigh, In 1595 the Duke of Northumberland made property in Durham over to Harriot, moving him up the social ladder into 'the landed gentry'. Not long after the Durham transactions, the Duke gave Harriot the use of one of the houses on the estate at Syon, to work on optics and the sine law of refraction. Harriot's sponsors began to fall from favor: Raleigh was the first, and Harriot's other patron Henry Percy, the Earl of Northumberland, was imprisoned in 1605 in connection with the Gunpowder Plot as he was closely connected to one of the conspirators, Thomas Percy. Harriot himself was interrogated and briefly imprisoned but was soon released. Walter Warner, Robert Hues, William Lower, and other scientists were present around the Earl of Northumberland's mansion as they worked for him and assisted in the teaching of the family's children. While this was occurring, Harriot continued his work involving mainly astronomy, and in 1607 Harriot used his notes from the observations of Halley's Comet to elaborate on his understanding of its orbit. Soon after, in 1609 and 1610 respectively, Harriot turned his attention towards the physical aspects of the Moon and his observations of the first sightings of sunspots. In early 1609, he bought a "Dutch trunke" (telescope), invented in 1608, and his observations were among the first uses of a telescope for astronomy. Harriot is now credited as the first astronomer to draw an astronomical object after viewing it through a telescope: he drew a map of the Moon on 5 August 1609 [O.S. 26 July 1609], preceding Galileo by several months. By 1613, Harriot had created two maps of the whole Moon, with many identifiable features such as lunar craters depicted in their correct relative positions that were not to be improved upon for several decades. He also observed sunspots in December 1610. Death From 1614 Harriot was consulting Theodore de Mayerne, who was among James I's doctors, for an apparent cancer of the left nostril that was gradually eating away the septum and was apparently linked to a cancerous ulcer on his lip. This progressed until 1621, when he was living with a friend named Thomas Buckner on Threadneedle Street. There he died, apparently from skin cancer. It was suspected that