NEWSFLASH:Dave McDonald discovers Asteroid 2008TM9

I would also add my heartiest congratulations to Dave on this wonderful discovery. As Dave is away at his press conference, I'll give you the gist of how it happened.

2008TM9 was fist recorded on Tuesday night. A moving object detected on a sequence of survey images did not correlate to any known asteroid. In fact it was just one of three objects which were unidentified and recorded at Celbridge and Raheny observatories. Two of the objects recorded at raheny were subsequently identified as asteroids discovered as early as a week ago by the LINEAR sky survey.

Anyway the object recorded at Celbridge by DaveMc remained unidentified. A second night of observations were carried out Before submitted to the minor planet centre, the observations were double/triple/quadruple checked by Dave/Andrea and myself and then sent to the MPC. I don't know who was more nervous while waiting for the response. There was lots of finger nail biting and praying going on. The fear is always that the MPC have observations in their database which they have not processed and will always issue a discovery to the earlier observer.

There wasn't long to wait until Tim Spahr at the MPC confirmed that the object Dave designated as DMCD001 was now officially K08T09M or more commonly 2008 TM9. After the yelling and screaming had died down the realisation sunk in that Dave had just discovered the first asteroid from these shores since Andrew Graham discovered (9) Metis in 1848. 160 years is a long time to wait but I'm sure Dave will agree that it was worth the wait.

You can expect to see further discoveries from these shores in the not too distant future but for the moment I'm sure everyone will agree that if anyone in Ireland deserves this then its Dave, a tireless astrometrist and a great guy allround.

I forgot to add that 2008 TM9 was discovered at magnitude 19.8 and its actually fading right now.

How wonderfully fantastic and super and fabulous and Deadly
My sincere congratulations to Dave Mc Donald.

How Cool is That ???

Deirdre Kelleghan
PRO IFAS
President IASB)

Orbital elements, orbit diagram, ephemeris etc available here

Dave,

Well done and indeed a pretty faint object. Much fainter than Metis.

How about a name?

John

Hard to resist this one, especially when it's smaller and fainter than Metis, but how about calling it Mini-Me(tis) :laugh:

Congratulations Dave on your fantastic achievement and to everyone involved in the confirmation work.

John