Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Juno: A Small Body on a Very Elliptical Orbit

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Juno: A Small Body on a Very Elliptical Orbit

Juno orbits at about 2.67 astronomical units with a period near 4.36 years, so it spends roughly four and a third months in a sign on average. Its inclination is about 13 degrees, which is steep enough to carry it outside the traditional zodiacal band of eight or nine degrees for part of each orbit, though nothing like the 35 degrees of Pallas.

The distinguishing figure is the eccentricity, about 0.256, among the highest of the large asteroids. Its distance from the Sun therefore swings between roughly 2.0 and 3.4 astronomical units, and its apparent motion swings with it: the body moves noticeably faster through the zodiac near perihelion than near aphelion, so the average of four and a third months per sign conceals a real variation from one passage to the next. An astrologer timing anything by a Juno ingress should take the date from an ephemeris rather than from the average.

Juno is also small, roughly 250 kilometres across and irregular in shape, the largest of the stony S-type asteroids but far behind Ceres, Vesta and Pallas in mass. It has not been visited by a spacecraft.

It was found on 1 September 1804 by Karl Ludwig Harding, at the Lilienthal observatory, the third asteroid discovered, between Olbers's two. Its brightness at a good opposition reaches about magnitude 7.5, well within reach of binoculars but never a naked eye object.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.