Anniversary: Ceres Discovered from Palermo’s Royal Palace — January 1, 1801

On the night of 1 January 1801, from the observatory in the Torre di Santa Ninfa of the Royal Palace of Palermo, Giuseppe Piazzi recorded a faint moving object and named it Ceres, after the goddess of Sicily. It was the first asteroid ever found, today classed as a dwarf planet. The tower still crowns the Palazzo dei Normanni, and the observatory founded there under Ferdinand of Bourbon remains the seat of Palermo’s astronomers — a Norman palace that entered the history of the sky.