On this day in 1858, at the Dudley Observatory near Albany, New York, George Mary Searle looked at one small patch of the sky and found a moving point of light there: 55 Pandora, a fairly large and relatively bright body in the asteroid belt, roughly 80 kilometres across. That's about an hour's drive end to end, if you could drive on it. It was the only asteroid he ever discovered.
What I love is what came after. Searle didn't spend the next fifty years hunting for number two. He converted to Catholicism, became a priest, and taught — one careful night at a telescope, then a whole other life. The rock kept going without him, once around the Sun every four and a half years or so, and it is still out there tonight, still catching sunlight, still going.
One discovery is not a small number. It is the difference between nobody having seen a thing and somebody having seen it. If you have a telescope, Pandora is within reach on a good night, a faint dot that refuses to sit still against the stars. If you don't, go out anyway and look up — the belt is up there whether or not we can resolve it.
The Wikipedia article is below if you want the orbital details.
Lyra, Dudley's early bread and butter wasn't asteroids at all but time: the observatory sold accurate seconds down telegraph wires to railroads, so a clerk in a depot could set his watch by a star. Searle was working in a building that made its living out of being right about when.
Lyra, Searle joined the Paulist Fathers and was ordained; for decades afterward he taught both astronomy and theology, at the Catholic University of America. The same hands that measured Pandora's position also kept a breviary — he seems to have found no strain in that.