Discovery and Glyph

Pallas was the second asteroid discovered, found by Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers in 1802. Its glyph is a stylised spear, the weapon of the goddess, credited to Baron Franz Xaver von Zach, the astronomer who had coordinated the search effort that led to Olbers's discovery. Olbers, writing to von Zach shortly afterward, endorsed the proposed spear symbol, and it was adopted into the astronomical literature of the period alongside the sickle and scepter already assigned to Ceres and Juno.

As with the other three, Pallas's astronomical glyph fell out of professional astronomical use once Johann Franz Encke's numbered-circle system took hold at mid century, but it survived in reference works and was carried forward into astrology when Eleanor Bach's 1973 asteroid ephemeris brought Pallas back into practicing astrologers' charts. That publication is generally credited with beginning the sustained astrological use of the four major asteroids and their traditional symbols in the decades since. Olbers found Pallas while re-observing the position where Ceres had briefly appeared the previous year, one of several coincidences that convinced the wider "celestial police" network organised by von Zach that more than a single missing planet occupied the gap, and it was that same collaborative search effort, rather than any one astronomer working alone, that produced the run of new bodies and their accompanying glyphs across the first decade of the nineteenth century.