Several thousand rocks with up to ca. 600 miles (1000 km) in diameter orbit around the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. Even in large telescopes they remain only faint stars, but it has its charm to locate them. A good and up-to-date star map is absolutely necessary to distinguish at least the brighter asteroids such as Ceres (maximum 6.6^m) from normal stars. To identify them, it helps if you make a sketch or a photo of the area every few nights – this makes the surprisingly rapid proper motion of asteroids obvious. Hunting asteroids is a nice challenge and a good way to get familiar with the sky.