This data set consists of obervations of the dwarf planet Ceres collected by Guiseppe Piazzi from 1st January 1801 to 11th February 1801. The data was published in the September 1801 edition of Monatliche Correspondenz, a volume of astronomical correspondence edited by Franz Xaver von Zach, the Hungarian astronomer who, with the aid of orbital predictions from a 24 year old Carl Friederich Gauss, was able to recover the 'lost planet' in early 1802.
First, here is the volume where the data was originally published.
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import pods
pods.notebook.display_google_book(id='JBw4AAAAMAAJ', page='GBS.PA280')
The data can be accessed as a pandas data frame through
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data = pods.datasets.ceres()['data']
data.describe()
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right_ascension = data['Gerade Aufstiegung in Graden']
declination = data['Geocentrische Laenger']
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline
plt.plot(right_ascension, declination, 'rx')
plt.xlabel('right ascension')
plt.ylabel('declination')
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pods.notebook.display_google_book(id='JBw4AAAAMAAJ', page='GBS.PA647')
The Dawn Mission arrived at at Ceres in April 2015. Here is a report from Astronomy Now showing a set of images from May 2015.
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