December 14, 1934

The New York Times reported that Dr. George Van Biesbroeck of the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory, the discoverer on July 27, 1933, of a minor planet of the 12th magnitude, had been notified by the Berlin Rechen-Institut that the planet had been named Vassar.

After Dr. Biesbroeck found the asteroid on a photographic plate, Caroline Furness ’91, director of the Vassar Observatory, requested his data so that the planet’s orbit could be computed. The computations, carried out as independent study by Grace Wilson ’34, were verified when the planet was observed in the positions predicted for it. The orbits of three such planets were found to be accurately predicted by the computations at Vassar, and a second of the three was named Radcliffe, after that college’s Class of 1925.