In the process of our planned survey of the sky of Sept 10, 2010, we discovered a bright (brighter than mag. 18) and moderately fast-moving (1.9″/min.), unidentified object. Its speed was nearly three times greater than the average speed of the asteroids in the group, but the NEO rating was small – a mere 21. At my request, observations of this object were carried out by Timur Kryachko at the Astrotel-Caucasus Observatory. The object’s rating didn’t increase, but the object was clearly unusual. Followup observations were made two days later – Sept 12. The rating increased by one…Calculating preliminary orbital elements with the help of the program FindOrb, I made the decision to personally write to the dirrector of the Minor Planet Center, Timothy Spahr. Having sent him all the measurements of the object in question, I received a reply.?

GO ahead and send your other night(s) for this object
as soon as you can.  I suspect it is a new NEO.

Tim

After this letter, the object was placed on the confirmation page of Near-Earth and generally unusual new Solar System objects. After that, supplementary observations of the object iJQJ230 were obtained at the Tzec Maun and RAS Observatories (Moorook, Australia).
After several hour the long awaited circular came out. iJQJ230 turned out to be an near-Earth asteroid of the Amor family. It was assigned the designation 2010 RN80. The asteroid will pass at its minimum distance from the Earth, 0.112 a.u., on Oct. 18, 2010 at 10:11 U.T. Its diameter is estimated at 360 meters.

Orbit Viewer

The object is fairly large, and in the first half of October it will reach mag. 17.7. It will be visible in moderate-sized telescopes until the beginning of 2011. Thus, in the course of observations over many months, it will be possible to acquire a sufficiently precise orbit to try to find 2010 RN10 in the archives.
With regard to measurements, the object has a rather large eccentricity – 0.52 which is rather rare for an object with similar orbital elements. Below you can see the distribution of known objects.

The first discovery of a near-earth asteroid was a the result of a long journey and a huge amount of work at our remote observatory. I hope that future interesting discoveries don’t require such a long wait.
Numerous congratulations have come to us from our friends in various parts of the world…

Timothy Spahr, USA:

Congratulations to you and your team!  This
is a fine discovery.  Good work looking
where you did, and paying attention, and getting
follow-up.  Keep up the excellent work!

Tim

Sergio Foglia, Italy:

Hi Leonid

congratulations for your discovery

Sincerely

Sergio

Paulo Holvorcem, Brazil:

Hey Leonid,

Congratulations on the bright NEO, 2010 RN80!
Just saw the MPEC.

Best,
Paulo

Tomas Vorobjov, Netherlands

Brilliant,

congratulations Leonid!

Tom

And here are some of them. An excellent stimulus to continue our work!

September 2, 4, 5, and 6, at the observatory, observations were made of yet another interesting gamma ray burster – GRB 100901A. Notice about it arrived when it was already morning at the observatory, and we were able to begin observing it just over 20 hours after the recording of the burst.The optical afterglow was easily visible on the images, with a brightness of mag. 17.82. This is the brightest of such objects observed at our observatory. Its uniqueness is that GRB 100901A has preserved its brightness at such a high level longer than all the other known gamma ray bursters. In the picture at left, you can see how the brightness of the afterglow faded over the next three days. The last estimate of the brightness was received at the Maidanak Observatory (Volnova et al., GCN 11266). After 6.2977 days, the brightness of the object had faded to mag. 22.05.

As with the previous unusual gamma ray burster GRB 100814A, a sufficiently rare occurrence was recorded – radio afterglow. The EVLA radio telescope (Expanded Very Large Array) recorded an afterglow at frequencies of 4.5 and 7.9 gHz.

TITLE:   GCN CIRCULAR

NUMBER:  11234

SUBJECT: GRB 100901A: ISON-NM optical observations

DATE:    10/09/06 17:30:05 GMT

FROM:    Leonid Elenin at ISON

L. Elenin, I. Molotov (ISON) and A. Pozanenko (IKI) report on behalf of

larger GRB  follow-up collaboration:

We continue observation of the Swift GRB 100901A (Immler et al. GCN Circ.

11159) with 0.45-m telescope of ISON-NM observatory on Sep. 04 (UT) 09:04:35 –

10:06:19, Sep. 05 (UT) 08:45:52 – 09:50:20 and Sep. 06 (UT) 09:36:57 – 11:14:22.

The afterglow (Immler et al., GCN 11159; Guidorzi et al., GCN 11160; Ivanov

et al., GCN 11161; Klunko et al., GCN 11162) is well detected on stacked images

for three epochs.

Preliminary photometry of unfiltered image against USNO-B1.0 1127-0027229,

assuming R=16.16  is following:

T-T0      filter   exposure   mag.  mag. error

————————————————————–

2.8336    W      12×300   19.78    +/- 0.25

3.8206    W      12×300   20.38    +/- 0.20

4.8700    W      20×300   20.97    +/- 0.22

————————————————————–

The images of GRB100901A is available at:

http://www.spaceobs.org/images/GRB1000901A-3epochs.jpg

On Sunday, Sept. 5, NASA’s EPOXI  spacecraft (formerly Deep Impact) was obtained the first of more than 64,000 images it’s expected to take of comet 103P/Hartley 2. This first image of comet Hartley 2 taken by Deep Impact was taken by the spacecraft’s Medium Resolution Imager when the spacecraft was 60 million kilometers (37.2 million miles) away from the comet. The rendezvous with 103P scheduled on Nov. 4, 2010.