Juno

Juno was discovered on 1 September 1804 by Karl Harding at Lilienthal, the third asteroid found. It is a stony body of moderate size in the main belt and, like Pallas, was briefly counted a planet before the asteroid category was established. The name is that of the Roman Juno, the Greek Hera, queen of the gods and wife of Jupiter, whose cult title Juno Pronuba attached her to marriage and whose mythology is dominated by her husband's infidelities and her responses to them. Modern astrological practice, again dating from the 1970s asteroid literature, reads Juno for marriage and committed partnership, for the terms on which a person bonds, and for the shadow side of that: jealousy, betrayal and the negotiation of power within a relationship. As with the other asteroids, the meaning follows from the mythological name given by the discoverer and is a modern construction.

Juno's status as the third asteroid discovered, after Ceres and Pallas, places its find within a short, intense burst of early nineteenth-century asteroid-hunting, all four of the earliest asteroids, Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta, were located within eight years of one another between 1801 and 1807 before a long gap of decades before the next discoveries, a pattern astronomers of the period took as suggestive of a systematic search region between Mars and Jupiter rather than scattered chance finds.

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.

Juno was the third asteroid discovered, found by Karl Ludwig Harding in 1804. Its glyph is a sceptre crowned with a star, and unlike the symbols for Pallas and Vesta, which were proposed by other astronomers, this one was assigned by Harding himself, the discoverer, drawing on Juno's status as queen of the gods and her traditional emblem of royal authority. The sceptre and star appeared in the astronomical almanacs of the early nineteenth century alongside the glyphs for Ceres, Pallas and Vesta until the 1850s, when Encke's reformed numbering system in the Berliner Astronomisches Jahrbuch replaced individual symbols for newly found asteroids, though the original four kept theirs in reference use.

Juno's glyph, like the others, re-entered active astrological practice through Eleanor Bach's 1973 ephemeris of the four asteroids, which is the documented starting point for their sustained use as chart factors in Western astrology. Harding assigned the sceptre and star not long after Gauss and von Zach had already fixed symbols for Ceres and Pallas, so by the time Juno was named the practice of giving each new asteroid an individually designed emblem, rather than a bare number, was already an established custom among the small circle of astronomers involved in the search.