A Brief Historical Account of the Discovery of the Asteroids

Leading up to the reasons why Eros, very soon after its discovery was recognized to be the most important asteroid up to that time

Lord Rosse's Great Telescope

The target of the NEAR mission is the asteroid Eros. Eros is not just some random rock in space, it is one of the more historically important asteroids, although that is not why it is the target of the NEAR mission. Understanding why Eros was important to astronomers of the past will add to the enjoyment of this web site. This is not meant to be a complete history of this part of astronomy, but an effort has been made to add enough detail to help understand the problems and issues that faced scientists of the past. They sometimes paid a high price to obtain knowledge we often take for granted. Astronomers of centuries past didn't have many of our modern conveniences such as computers or electronic calculators, but still made scentific advances through hard work and tedious manual calculations. Clever ideas also played a part in the story, along with random luck both good and bad. An important point of this section is that, even though astronomers extract an incredible amount of information from remote observations of distant objects, the techniques used are not magic, but can be understand and appreciated with a bit of effort. We are very privileged today to be able to visit by spacecraft some of the objects of their study, and often find that earlier astronomers left us a firm foundation from which to expand our knowledge.

Much of the following material does not relate directly to the asteroid Eros. But it will lead up to Eros and show how this asteroid fits into the bigger picture. The story has been pieced together from numerous sources, where possible details such as full names and dates have been included. Perhaps you will find something interesting here.

    Ray Sterner

Table of Contents A missing planet? A planet is found ... wait a minute, something is odd ... Too many planets, asteroids cause headaches The quest for the solar parallax, world-wide adventures Eros comes onstage, finally a useful asteroid

The Lick Telescope

visits since 1999 Jul 8

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Illustrations:
"Lord Rosse's Great Telescope" scanned from Fourteen Weeks in Descriptive Astronomy, J. Dorman Steele, A. S. Barnes & Co., New York, 1871
"The Lick Telescope" scanned from Elements of Descriptive Astronomy, a Text-Book, Herbert A. Howe, Silver Burdett and Company, New York, 1897