Discovery and Glyph

Vesta was the fourth asteroid discovered, found by Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers in 1807, the same astronomer who had found Pallas five years earlier. Its glyph is a stylised hearth or altar fire, originally credited to the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who had already made his name computing Ceres's recovered orbit and went on to design a symbol showing the altar of Vesta's cult with its sacred flame. That fuller image circulated in nineteenth-century astronomical tables before falling from use.

When Eleanor Bach compiled her 1973 "Ephemerides of the Asteroids," the source generally credited with returning Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta to astrological practice, she introduced a simplified rendering of Gauss's hearth glyph, and it is this pared-down form, rather than the original altar image, that became the standard Vesta symbol in the astrological software and printed ephemerides used today. Vesta's brightness, the very quality that had let earlier observers glimpse it without a telescope, meant its glyph history was documented unusually well from the start, with Gauss's original altar image reproduced in the astronomical almanacs of the period well before any of the four asteroids had astrological significance at all.