December 9, 2008 at 2:48am
A new MBA asteroid has been discovered during a short A79 search campaign: 2008 WN96. The body is a typical member of the inner group of the belt and has a period of 3.2 years. Currently the asteroid brightness is 19.9V magnitude. The observations were performed by K. Dankov, L. Vrigazov and F. Fratev.
We temporary opened our observatory, equipped with a new 35cm f/2.6 Orion Optics telescope, and plan to observe to the end of December 2008.
Update 2008/12/20: 2008 WN96 was detected on old NEAT images (SkyMorph archive) from 2001. Additional observations were added by MPC, thus the orbit was improved and the body became observed at 4 oppositions.
