Speaking of old German things

I came across another old German book here, upon doing a search for the keyword Ceres during the 50 or so years it was considered to be a planet. This was back before the term asteroid had been clearly defined, when the only objects we were capable of discovering were around planetary size. Eventually so many of them were discovered that a decision was made to call them something else besides a planet, the term asteroid was coined, and Ceres vanished from view. Who wants to explore an asteroid, after all, when there are planets to be explored? Were Ceres to have remained a planet, it likely would have been visited a lot sooner than early 2015.

As a book from 1805 the German orthography is old and the first parts of the book are full of calculations along with bad scans that make it hard to read. Around page 300 though it gets into direct observations of the planet, and by then the scanning quality is better. So if you're into that sort of thing, read a bit of the intro, then skip over the badly scanned parts and then make your way toward the end.