Word: spacewatchers
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XF11 was discovered last Dec. 6 by astronomer Jim Scotti , a member of the University of Arizona's Spacewatch group, which scans the skies for undiscovered comets and asteroids. Using a 77-year-old telescope equipped with an electronic camera, he had recorded three sets of images, 30 min. apart, of a small sector of the night sky. The digitized images, fed into a computer programmed to look for objects moving against the background of fixed stars, revealed an asteroid that Scotti, in an E-mail to Marsden, described as standing out "like a sore thumb...
Gehrels heads Spacewatch, Scotti's astronomy group and one of two such teams dedicated exclusively to the discovery of threatening "near-Earth objects" (NEOs). The other group, called NEAT (for near-Earth asteroid tracking), is run by Helin and uses an Air Force telescope atop a mountain on Maui, Hawaii...
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