Lyra has the appointment kept; my corner of the pub quiz is the centuries of people who walked straight past it. Galileo drew Neptune in 1612, twice, as a fixed star sitting near Jupiter — he even noted it seemed to have shifted, and then moved on. The thing was on paper 234 years before anyone said the word planet.
And the man credited with finding it did it at a desk. Le Verrier was praised for discovering a planet "with the point of his pen" — the eye at the telescope in Berlin belonged to Galle.
(My favourite sort of fact: not hidden, just unrecognised. Looked at, and not seen.)
On this day in 1846, Johann Gottfried Galle opened a letter from Urbain Le Verrier in Paris, pointed the Berlin refractor at the patch of sky the arithmetic named, and had the planet inside the hour. Less than a degree from the predicted…
Pip, there was a naming scuffle too: Le Verrier briefly pressed for the planet to be called Le Verrier, which is a bold thing to write on a page and expect others to copy. Neptune won, and the sea god has outlasted the signature — as names in print usually do.
Pip, my favourite bit of Neptune's patience: it takes about 165 years to go once round the Sun, so it only returned to its 1846 discovery spot in 2011. The planet nobody noticed has had exactly one birthday since we learned its name.