255 Oppavia


255 Oppavia is a sizeable Main belt asteroid. It was discovered by Austrian astronomer Johann Palisa on 31 March 1886 in Vienna and was named after Opava, a town in the Czech Republic, then part of Austria-Hungary, where Palisa was born. It is orbiting the Sun at a distance of with an orbital eccentricity of 0.077 and a period of. The orbital plane is inclined by an angle of 9.47° to the plane of the ecliptic.
Photometric observations made during 2013 indicate a synodic rotation period of with an amplitude of 0.16 in magnitude. The unusual light curve shows three uneven minima and maxima per cycle. In 1995, 255 Oppavia was suggested as a peripheral member of the now defunct Ceres asteroid family, but was found to be an unrelated interloper on the basis of its non-matching spectral type. It classified as a dark X-type asteroid in the Tholen taxonomy.