Sky & Telescope magazine/Courtesy The asteroid Vesta is moving
through the stars of the constellation Leo the Lion. On the
night of closest approach to Earth, Feb. 16 to 17, Vesta will be
positioned very close to the star labeled Algieba in the chart
above. Use binoculars or a small telescope to distinguish the
asteroid from the background stars. Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Jimmy Westlake's Celestial News column appears Tuesdays in the
Steamboat Today. Find more columns by Westlake here. If the
world was surprised in 1801 when Italian astronomer Giuseppe
Piazzi announced his discovery of the minor planet Ceres
orbiting between the major planets Mars and Jupiter, it was
shocked when, one year later, German astronomer Heinrich Olbers
found a second minor planet in the same region of space.
Subsequent searches then turned up two more minor planets: Juno
in 1804 and Olbers’ second discovery, Vesta, in 1807. Olbers
proposed that we were seeing the fragments of a disrupted planet
and predicted that many more pieces