Karl Ludwig Harding

Karl Ludwig Harding (1765-1834) was a German astronomer who worked as an assistant to Johann Hieronymus Schroter at the Lilienthal Observatory before later becoming a professor of astronomy at the University of Gottingen. Harding was a member of the Celestial Police, an informal group of European astronomers organized in the early 1800s to search systematically for a hypothesized planet between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. On September 1, 1804, using this coordinated search method, Harding discovered Juno, the third asteroid ever found in the main asteroid belt, following the earlier discoveries of Ceres and Pallas. The discovery of Juno helped establish that the region between Mars and Jupiter held not a single missing planet but a population of many smaller bodies, a finding that reshaped astronomers' understanding of the solar system's structure and laid groundwork for the systematic study of asteroids that continues today.