It was discovered on 19 February 1933, by astronomer Fred Whipple at the Oak Ridge Observatory operated by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, United States.
[4] Celestia's stony spectral type does not agree with those determined for the members of the Pallas family, which are typically "bright" carbonaceous B-type asteroids.
[14]: 23 In February and March 1995, a rotational lightcurve of Celestia was obtained from photometric observations at the Paul Feder Observatory by Walter Worman of Moorhead State University.
[12] An alternative period determination by René Roy of 12 hours was based on a fragmentary lightcurve and received a poor rating (U=1).
[6][7][8][9][10][11] The Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link adopts the results obtained by IRAS, that is, an albedo of 0.2573 and a diameter of 17.39 kilometers based on an absolute magnitude of 10.89.