According to Alexander Schnell, this minor planet was named by the discoverer after the U.S. city of Berkeley in California, where American astronomer and colleague Armin Otto Leuschner (1868–1953) was a long-time director at the Leuschner Observatory (then called Students' Observatory). Known for his books Celestial Mechanics and The Minor Planets of the Hecuba Group, Leuschner worked on the orbit determination of 719 Albert, which was originally discovered by Palisa in 1911 but remained a lost asteroid until 2000. The naming citation was not mentioned in The Names of the Minor PlanetsbyPaul Herget in 1955.[3] Palisa also named asteroid 718 Erida after Leuschner's daughter. The lunar crater Leuschner and asteroid 1361 Leuschneria, discovered by Eugène Delporte in 1935, were later named directly after the American astronomer.
In May 2009, a rotational lightcurveofBerkeley was obtained from photometric observations by American amateur astronomer Joe Garlitz at his Elgin Observatory in Oregon. Lightcurve analysis gave a rotation periodof15.55±0.04 hours with a brightness variation of 0.25±0.03magnitude (U=2+).[a] Lower rated lightcurves obtained by Claes-Ingvar Lagerkvist in 1977, and by David Romeuf in 2018, gave a divergent period of larger than 17 h and 34.3±0.6 h with an amplitude of larger than 0.2 and 0.25±0.02 magnitude, respectively (U=1/2).[15][16]
According to the surveys carried out by the NEOWISE mission of NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the Infrared Astronomical Satellite IRAS, and the Japanese Akari satellite, Berkeley measures (19.768±0.167), (21.28±1.5) and (21.55±0.57) kilometers in diameter and its surface has an albedo of (0.220±0.045), (0.1801±0.028) and (0.182±0.011), respectively.[8][9][10][11]
The Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link derives an albedo of 0.2027 and a diameter of 21.38 kilometers based on an absolute magnitude of 10.7.[12] Alternative mean-diameters published by the WISE team include (21.519±0.054 km) and (21.89±0.78 km) with a corresponding albedo of (0.1808±0.0518) and (0.170±0.017).[6][12]
^ abcdUsui, Fumihiko; Kuroda, Daisuke; Müller, Thomas G.; Hasegawa, Sunao; Ishiguro, Masateru; Ootsubo, Takafumi; et al. (October 2011). "Asteroid Catalog Using Akari: AKARI/IRC Mid-Infrared Asteroid Survey". Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan. 63 (5): 1117–1138. Bibcode:2011PASJ...63.1117U. doi:10.1093/pasj/63.5.1117. (online, AcuA catalog p. 153)