July 22, 1826: Fr. Giuseppe Piazzi dies
Today in the history of astronomy, the man who discovered Ceres passes away.
An 1802 illustration of the discovery of Ceres depicts the dwarf planet as the goddess it’s named after; note the wheat stalks for the goddess of grain and agriculture. Credit: The Linda Hall Library
Born in 1746 in Ponte, Italy, Giuseppe Piazzi was ordained as a priest in 1769. He taught theology, philosophy, and mathematics at various points in his career, but in 1787 became a professor of astronomy, and King Ferdinand of Sicily appointed him as the director of the Palermo Astronomical Observatory. On New Year’s Day 1801, Piazzi was working on a catalog of star positions when he spotted a new object in the sky, a “light that was a little faint and colored as Jupiter.” He called it a comet, but suspected it was something more than that. When Piazzi announced the find in 1801, it was classified as a planet and named Ceres Ferdinandea; William Herschel later proposed that it and Pallas (discovered in 1802) be called asteroids. Piazzi died on July 22, 1826. Almost 200 years later, in 2006, Ceres was re-designated again, making Piazzi the first person to discover a dwarf planet.
Elisa Neckar is senior production editor of Astronomy magazine, and the editor of the Today in the History of Astronomy feature on Astronomy.com.
