discovered a second object in the same region, Pallas. Unlike the other known planets, Ceres and Pallas remained points of light even under the highest telescope magnifications instead of resolving into discs. Apart from their rapid movement, they appeared indistinguishable from stars. Accordingly, in 1802, William Herschel suggested they be placed into a separate category, named "asteroids", after the Greek asteroeides, meaning "star-like". Upon completing a series of observations of Ceres and Pallas, he concluded, Neither the appellation of planets nor that of comets can with any propriety of language be given to these two stars ... They resemble small stars so much as hardly to be distinguished from them. From this, their asteroidal appearance, if I take my name, and call them Asteroids; reserving for myself, however, the liberty of changing that name, if another, more expressive of their nature, should occur. By 1807, further investigation revealed two new objects in the region: Juno and Vesta. The burning of Lilienthal in the Napoleonic wars, where the main body of work had been done, brought this first period of discovery to a close. Despite Herschel's coinage, for several decades it remained common practice to refer to these objects as planets and to prefix their names with numbers representing their sequence of discovery: 1 Ceres, 2 Pallas, 3 Juno, 4 Vesta. In 1845, though, astronomers detected a fifth object (5 Astraea) and, shortly thereafter, new objects were found at an accelerating rate. Counting them among the planets became increasingly cumbersome. Eventually, they were dropped from the planet list (as first suggested by Alexander von Humboldt in the early 1850s) and Herschel's coinage, "asteroids", gradually came into common use. The discovery of Neptune in 1846 led to the discrediting of the Titius–Bode law in the eyes of scientists because its orbit was nowhere near the predicted position. To date, no scientific explanation for the law has been given, and astronomers' consensus regards it as a coincidence. [[File:951 Gaspra.jpg|right|thumb|951 Gaspra, the first asteroid imaged by a spacecraft, as viewed during Galileo'''s 1991 flyby; colors are exaggerated]] The expression "asteroid belt" came into use in the early 1850s, although pinpointing who coined the term is difficult. The first English use seems to be in the 1850 translation (by Elise Otté) of Alexander von Humboldt's Cosmos: "[...] and the regular appearance, about the 13th of November and the 11th of August, of shooting stars, which