How a speck of light becomes an asteroid
On the first day of the year 1801, Italian astronomer Gioacchino Giuseppe Maria Ubaldo Nicolò Piazzi found a previously uncharted "tiny star" near the constellation of Taurus. The following night Piazzi again observed this newfound celestial object, discovering that the speck had changed its position relative to the nearby stars. Piazzi knew that real stars were so far away that they never wandered—that they always appeared in the sky as fixed in location relative to each other. Due to the movement of this new object, the astronomer to the king of the two Sicilies suspected he had discovered something much closer—something within our solar system. Piazzi made history's first asteroid discovery. He named it after the Roman goddess for agriculture: Ceres.