277 Elvira is a typical main belt

Asteroid belt

The asteroid belt is the region of the Solar System located roughly between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter. It is occupied by numerous irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids or minor planets...

 asteroid

Asteroid

Asteroids are a class of small Solar System bodies in orbit around the Sun. They have also been called planetoids, especially the larger ones...

 and a member of the Koronis asteroid family

Koronis family

]The Koronis family is a family of asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. They are thought to have been formed at least two billion years ago in a catastrophic collision between two larger bodies. The largest known is about in diameter. The Koronis family travels in a cluster along...

.

It was discovered by Auguste Charlois

Auguste Charlois

Auguste Honoré Charlois was a French astronomer who discovered 99 asteroids while working in Nice.His first discovery was the asteroid 267 Tirza in 1887...

 on May 3, 1888 in Nice

Nice

Nice is the fifth most populous city in France, after Paris, Marseille, Lyon and Toulouse, with a population of 348,721 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Nice extends beyond the administrative city limits with a population of more than 955,000 on an area of...

. (277) Elvira is possibly named for a character in Alphonse de Lamartine

Alphonse de Lamartine

Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine was a French writer, poet and politician who was instrumental in the foundation of the Second Republic.-Career:...

’s Méditations poétiques (1820) and Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (1830).

A group of astronomers, including Lucy D’Escoffier Crespo da Silva and Richard P. Binzel

Richard P. Binzel

Richard "Rick" P. Binzel is a Professor of Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the inventor of the Torino Scale, a method for categorizing the impact hazard associated with near-Earth objects such as asteroids and comets.Binzel was awarded the H. C. Urey Prize...

, used observations made between 1998 through 2000 to determine the spin-vector alignment of the Koronis family of asteroids, including 277 Elvira. The collaborative work resulted in the creation of 61 new individual rotation lightcurves to augment previous published observations.