Naming a project can be almost as hard as naming a baby. This page illustrates one of the difficulties: the humorous and sometimes confusing juxtapositions that arise when two different entities are given the same name.
The Vesta project was named for the Roman goddess of the hearth. From the Random House dictionary (1966):
Vesta 1. the ancient Roman goddess of the hearth, worshiped in a temple containing an altar on which a sacred fire was kept burning under the care of vestal virgins: identified with the Greek Hestia. 2. Astron. the third largest and one of the four brightest asteroids. 3. (l.c.) Brit. a short friction match with a wood or wax shank. 4. a girl's given name. [akin to Gk hestia hearth, household]
The Vesta truck on our home page belongs to a Norwegian insurance company named Vesta. Jim Horning happened to see it on the street while visiting Norway and photographed it for the project. Later we did an AltaVista search and found the truck's owner.
The Vesta life preserver above has a similar story. Marc H. Brown saw it while travelling in Scandanavia. Like Jim, he photographed it for us but had no idea why it was labelled vesta. Later we found out that it came from the same insurance company as the truck; the life preserver is another of their logos, and they gave out real ship life preservers as a promotion.
Occasional web searches also turned up a weird and wonderful assortment of other things named Vesta. Here are some of them: