Giuseppe Piazzi discovers Ceres

On the first night of the nineteenth century the Sicilian priest Giuseppe Piazzi found a faint moving star in Taurus while compiling a star catalogue in Palermo. He tracked it for six weeks until it vanished in the Sun's glare. The young mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss developed a new method to compute its orbit from so few observations, and it was recovered at the end of the year. It lay in the gap between Mars and Jupiter where astronomers had expected a planet. Ceres was soon joined by many similar bodies, and it is now classed as a dwarf planet and the largest object of the asteroid belt.

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