39 Laetitia

Also known as (39) Laetitia, Laetitia

main-belt asteroid

Picture of the Day · NASA

Jupiter and Venus from Earth

2026-06-07

It was visible around the world. The sunset conjunction of Jupiter (left) and Venus (right) in 2012 was visible almost no matter where you lived on Earth. Anyone on our planet with a clear western horizon at sunset could see them. That year, a creative photographer traveled away from the town lights of Szubin, Poland to photograph a near closest approach of the two planets. The bright planets were then separated by only three degrees and his daughter struck a humorous pose. A faint red sunset still glowed in the background. Jupiter and Venus are together again this week after sunset, passing within a degree of each other about two days from today.

Key facts

Discovered by: J. Chacornac
Discovery date: 8 February 1856
Pronunciation: / l ɛ ˈ t ɪ ʃ i ə /
Named after: Laetitia
Minor planet category: Main belt
Aphelion: 461.503 million km (3.085 AU)

~2 min read

Article

39 Laetitia photographed in December 2020 39 Laetitia is a large main-belt asteroid that was discovered by French astronomer Jean Chacornac on 9 February 1856 and named after Laetitia, a minor Roman goddess of gaiety. The spectrum matches an S-type, indicating a stony (silicate) composition. It is orbiting the Sun with a period of 4.61 years and is spinning on its axis once every 5.1 hours.

Photometric observations of this asteroid gathered between 1968 and 1974 were used to build a light curve that provided shape and rotation information. It has the general shape of an elongated triaxial ellipsoid with ratios between the lengths of the axes equal to 15:9:5. Major surface features are on a scale of 10 km and the surface color does not vary significantly across the surface. In the ecliptic coordinate system, the pole of rotation is estimated to be oriented to the coordinates (λ0, β0) = (121°±10°, +37°±10°).