Discovery and Glyph

Ceres was the first asteroid discovered, found by Giuseppe Piazzi on 1 January 1801 from the observatory at Palermo. Its glyph is a stylised sickle, the harvesting tool of the goddess, chosen by contemporary astronomers who ratified Piazzi's name for the new body shortly after its discovery. When Ceres was lost to view behind the Sun later that year, the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss devised a method of orbit determination from limited observations that successfully predicted where it would reappear, a feat that made his reputation and let astronomers recover the object.

The sickle glyph continued in astronomical use through the mid nineteenth century before individual asteroid symbols fell out of favour. It returned to active use in 1973, when the astrologer Eleanor Bach published "Ephemerides of the Asteroids," an ephemeris for Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta that revived their historic glyphs for a new generation of astrologers and effectively founded the modern astrological practice of working with the four bodies. The recovery itself was dramatic: Piazzi tracked Ceres for only a few weeks before it vanished into the Sun's glare, and it was Gauss's prediction that let Franz Xaver von Zach relocate it on 31 December 1801, with Heinrich Olbers independently confirming the sighting the following night, an episode that linked the same small circle of astronomers who would soon be credited with the other three asteroids' glyphs as well.