An Asteroid in Astrology

Juno is one of the four principal asteroids of modern astrology, named for the Roman queen of the gods and goddess of marriage. It is considerably smaller than Ceres, Pallas or Vesta, roughly 230 kilometres across, and orbits within the same main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Juno was the third of the large asteroids to be found, arriving two years after Pallas and continuing the run of discoveries that convinced astronomers a whole population of small bodies occupied the gap Johann Bode's spacing rule had predicted for a missing planet.

Like Ceres and Pallas before it, Juno was assigned its own pictorial glyph on discovery rather than a bare number, a practice that continued only through the fourth of these bodies before the growing tally of new asteroid finds made individual symbols impractical for astronomers, though the four survived into later astrological use precisely because they had been given distinct emblems tied to their mythological names. Harding, who made the discovery while serving as assistant at Johann Hieronymus Schröter's private observatory in Lilienthal, was one of the twenty-four astronomers in von Zach's coordinated search network, sometimes called the celestial police, whose members between them accounted for the discovery of all four of the asteroids that would later anchor the astrological use of these bodies.