I just received a very short message from the Minor Planet Center. It read: UOFU09 K08R77V Loose translation: Patrick's asteroid discovery # 3 1/2. A bit of a story behind this. Monday morning I was imaging an exo-planet transit (thanks Cindy and Jerry for getting me into that) when it got too low in the sky to follow. It was still a few hours before dawn so to kill some time I just pointed the scope at a random part of the sky near the south meridian and shot some pictures. Examining those images I spotted something moving that was not in my database so I checked with MPC and they had no record either. So I suspected I might have something new but also knew one can not claim discovery credit until getting two nights' data. As you might remember, Monday had clear blue skies right up until it got dark. And then it clouded over. I spent hours trying to shoot through holes to no avail. So I put out a call for help on the Minor Planet Mailing List and within hours I had an observatory in Chile and another in Hawaii looking. The next day it was still cloudy here but a guy in Kansas emailed saying he'd obtained data. So putting all of that together I sent the last of the data to MPC early this morning and at 14:51 this afternoon the message shown above arrived. Reality check: On the one hand I realize that with some 400,000 minor planets known finding one more is no big deal. But then I get to thinking that with all of the automated searches going on with all of the big telescopes, it is kind of fun that photons from a relatively bright (Mag 18-19) space rock slipped through the big guys' nets and fell into my scope. All in all not a bad start for the day. patrick :)