Hubble photo of Ceres--looks like a planet to me!

[wonky]

Here's a pic of Ceres taken by the Hubble space telescope.<br /><br />http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2005/27/image/d<br /><br />Don't forget, when Ceres was first discovered, it was considered a planet, and it was demoted when so many other objects were found in the same area. (Sound familiar?)<br /><br />I have the feeling that to the general public, "dwarf planets" will just be considered a subcategory of planets.

 

[bonzelite]

wow. i had no idea Ceres was so spherical. that is stunning. how big is it compared to Earth's Moon? Ceres seems to have interesting surface features, too. it seems entirely ignored and undervalued as a science topic. maybe it has profound secrets. look at how small Enceladus is, for example. and how that little "impossible" world is baffling and contradicting science. <br /><br />

 

[bonzelite]

i just looked around google and found Ceres to be dwarfed by Earth's own Moon. Ceres is pretty small a world. our Moon, then, seems like a planet in it's size. Ceres seems about the size of Dione or Enceladus. mabe a wee bit larger than those. <br /><br />yet, for an asteroid, it's too big, really. and too round. thus, 'dwarf planet.' that seems apropos.

 

[3488]

We had already started a good thread on 1 Ceres. Look on Page 2 of the below thread. See how planet like 1 Ceres appears to be. <br /><br />Look at the incredible Keck 2 adaptive optics images of 1 Ceres provided by Jon Clarke (Jon Clarke was more than kind enough to post them for my benefit as the links he provided did not work for me). I have found other HST images of 1 Ceres too.<br /><br />1 Ceres has an equatorial diameter of about 949 kilometres (589 miles).<br /><br />The Moon has a diameter of 3,480 kilometres (2,163 miles), Jupiter's volcanic moon Io has a diameter of 3,633 kilometres (2,258 miles), so 1 Ceres is roughly 30% of these two in size, so 1 Ceres is quite large.<br /><br />1 Ceres rotates on its axis in about 9 Hours & 8 minutes, axial tilt 6 degrees, north polar star 54 Draconis, south polar star Alpha Pictoris.<br /><br />There are a lot of us who are very interested in 1 Ceres.<br /><br />See the link below.<br /><br />Contains some AMAZING images of 1 Ceres.<br /><br />http://uplink.space.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=sciastro&Number=556077&page=1&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=0&fpart=<br /><br />Andrew Brown. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#000080">"I suddenly noticed an anomaly to the left of Io, just off the rim of that world. It was extremely large with respect to the overall size of Io and crescent shaped. It seemed unbelievable that something that big had not been visible before".</font> <em><strong><font color="#000000">Linda Morabito </font></strong><font color="#800000">on discovering that the Jupiter moon Io was volcanically active. Friday 9th March 1979.</font></em></p><p><font size="1" color="#000080">http://www.launchphotography.com/</font><br /><br /><font size="1" color="#000080">http://anthmartian.googlepages.com/thisislandearth</font></p><p><font size="1" color="#000080">http://web.me.com/meridianijournal</font></p> </div>

 

[MeteorWayne]

Sizes for the 27 largest solar orbiting objects are in the Pluto Perspectives- Part 1 thread <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#000080"><em><font color="#000000">But the Krell forgot one thing John. Monsters. Monsters from the Id.</font></em> </font></p><p><font color="#000080">I really, really, really, really miss the "first unread post" function</font><font color="#000080"> </font></p> </div>

 

[Philotas]

Yeah it does; but some of us can't count higher than 8, so we'll have to call it dwarf planet. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[wonky]

Well, I was perplexed when I first learned that Ceres was under consideration for planethood. I thought aseroids were all just undifferentiated chunks of rock. I decided to research the topic, and found out everything listed above here. Looks like only in the past couple of years serious attention has been payed to Ceres.<br /><br />This was the only color picture I could find. Looks kind of like Mars, doesn't it? Now that Ceres is a dwarf planet, is it still an asteroid?