Giuseppe Piazzi

Giuseppe Piazzi was an Italian Catholic priest of the Theatine order, mathematician and astronomer best known for discovering the first known asteroid and dwarf planet, Ceres. On January 1, 1801, observing from the Palermo Astronomical Observatory that he himself had established in 1790, Piazzi noticed what he first took for a fixed star but recognized over successive nights as a moving object, which he cautiously announced as a possible comet before it was confirmed as a new kind of small planetary body. He named the object Ceres after the Roman goddess of grain, adding the honorific Ferdinandea for King Ferdinand IV of Naples and Sicily, a name later dropped for political reasons. Piazzi also compiled the Palermo Catalogue, a listing of 7,646 stars measured with unprecedented precision, published in 1803 and again in an expanded 1814 edition, for which he won the Lalande Prize in 1803. He was later appointed General Director of the Naples and Sicily Observatories in 1817.