01Antiquity
Pictures in the stars
Long before telescopes, cultures around the world grouped stars into figures and told stories about them. Many constellation names still in use descend from Mesopotamian and Greek tradition.
About Asteria
A registry for the names we give the sky.
Asteria is an independent project building a curated registry of named asteroids — each with a story, a certificate and an on-chain token. Honest about what a name can be, and what it can’t.
01Why we are building this
People have always named the sky. Asteria is a small, careful way to take part — a registry name, a certificate and a token — without pretending to own a piece of it, and without pretending the name is official.
There are more than a million known asteroids. Most are catalogued by number and provisional designation — precise, and almost impossible to love. We think a well-chosen name, with its meaning written down, is a good way to make one of them feel close.
So we are building the registry carefully: real orbital science, plain-language docs, and clear limits. A token is a digital collectible and a registry entry. It is not a property right in an asteroid, not an IAU name, and not an investment. Everything else on this site follows from that.
02Why names matter
Naming the sky is one of our oldest habits.
From star pictures to numbered minor planets, people have always reached for names to make the sky shareable.
021801
Ceres, the first
On 1 January 1801, Giuseppe Piazzi found a slow-moving point of light between Mars and Jupiter. He named it after Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture. Today it is classed as a dwarf planet.
031922
A shared map
The International Astronomical Union, founded in 1919, adopted the list of 88 modern constellations in 1922 — one sky, divided the same way for everyone.
04Today
Tens of thousands of names
Tens of thousands of minor planets now carry official names honouring scientists, artists, places and myths — each one approved by the International Astronomical Union.
05Asteria
A registry of our own
Asteria adds a different kind of name: a registry name, kept in our catalogue and on a certificate. It sits beside the official record — never in place of it.
03Values
Three words we hold ourselves to.
Not slogans — checks. If a page, a name or a feature fails one of these, it doesn’t ship.
01
Honesty
We say what a token is — a digital collectible and a registry entry — and what it is not.
- Not ownership of an asteroid
- Not an official IAU name
- Not an investment
02
Science
Every orbital and physical figure on the site is derived from stored elements with real physics — and every simplification is documented.
- Kepler’s third law for periods
- Standard magnitude relations
- Sources named, limits stated
03
Craft
A name, a certificate and a page should feel made with care — because they are.
- Names chosen one by one
- A certificate worth keeping
- Accessible, fast, readable
04How we work with data
Derived, not decorated.
Every number you see is computed from a few stored values with well-known physics. Here is one entry, worked through.
Preview data, labelled
The catalogue on this site is demonstration data: realistic, internally consistent, and marked “Preview data” wherever it appears.
Verified before sale
Before anything is offered, each entry is to be cross-checked against public small-body databases, such as the Minor Planet Center and JPL’s Small-Body Database.
Derived, not decorated
Period, perihelion, absolute magnitude and orbit class are computed from the stored elements — never typed in by hand.
Open about limits
Where we simplify — a circular-orbit speed, an albedo estimate — the docs say so, and say why.
Vesperine
S-typePreview data
Stored
- aSemi-major axis
- 2.64 AU
- eEccentricity
- 0.11
- iInclination
- 7.2°
- DDiameter
- 3.8 km
- pGeometric albedo
- 0.24
Derived
Orbital period
P = a^1.54.29 yrPerihelion
q = a(1 − e)2.35 AUAphelion
Q = a(1 + e)2.93 AUMean orbital speed
v ≈ 29.78 / √a18.3 km/sAbsolute magnitude
H = 5·log₁₀(1329 / (D·√p))14.3Orbit class
from a, q, Q, iMiddle main belt05Contact
Say hello.
A question about a name, a correction to the science, or a thought about the project — write any time.