Cliff Cunningham
ABSTRACT
When Giuseppe Piazzi first saw Ceres Ferdinandea on 1 January 1801, he could scarcely have imagined the media firestorm he would unleash. It was a unique event in the history of astronomy: an object that could very well be another planet first found, then lost, then recovered. All in less than a year! Magazines and newspapers in England, France and Germany reported it all, often to the exasperation of the professional astronomical community. Using newspaper reports never before included in the history of the discovery of what Piazzi dubbed a ‘planetoid,’ this study looks at what was written in the media, and how the editor of the world’s only astronomical journal, Baron Franz von Zach, engaged with misleading and confusing articles in the German newspapers.