Who discovered the asteroid 55 Pandora at Albany Observatory in 1858?

George Mary Searle discovered asteroid 55 Pandora at Albany Observatory in 1858. Searle was an American astronomer who worked at the observatory in Albany, New York, where he identified several minor planets.

The asteroid received the name Pandora in keeping with the classical naming tradition used for many nineteenth-century asteroids. Its number, 55, indicates that it was the fifty-fifth minor planet to receive a permanent number in the historical numbering sequence.

55 Pandora is a main-belt asteroid, so it travels around the Sun in the broad zone between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It is unrelated physically to Saturn’s moon Pandora, despite sharing the mythological name.

This discovery is sometimes confused with discoveries made by more famous astronomers such as Giuseppe Piazzi, who discovered Ceres, or Asaph Hall, who discovered Mars’s moons. Those astronomers did not discover 55 Pandora.