The first time I found one, I almost didn’t report it.
It was April 2021, and I was twelve years old, sitting in front of a secondhand Lenovo laptop in Venezuela, squinting at a set of telescope images from the other side of the world. The Pan-STARRS Observatory in Hawaiʻi had sent me its latest batch of frames of raw, pixelated snapshots of the asteroid belt, and somewhere inside those grainy images, buried in the noise, was a pair of black dots that seemed to be moving.
I hesitated. They were so small. Just pixels barely distinguishable from cosmic-ray artifacts, from the bloom of a faint star, from the visual static that plagues any deep-sky image. Could this actually be something new? I almost talked myself out of it. But I included it in my report anyway, sent it off to the astronomers at Hardin-Simmons University, and tried not to think about it too much.
Eight months later, I was in the middle of a tennis tournament.
When the match ended, I picked up my phone and saw the message. The object I had flagged had been confirmed. It had been observed a second time by a sky survey within the required window, cross-referenced against every known object in the Minor Planet Center’s database, and assigned a provisional designation by the MPC. It was real. It was new.
I started jumping. Then crying. My parents grabbed me. The other players stared, baffled, at a kid who had apparently lost his mind over a tennis result. I didn’t bother explaining. How do you explain, in the middle of a sports court, that you’ve just been told there’s a rock orbiting the Sun that no one had ever formally seen before, and that you were the one who found it?
How a kid in Barquisimeto ends up searching the Asteroid Belt
I should explain how any of this is possible in the first place, because the question I get most often is some version of “Don’t you need, like… a telescope?”
The answer is no. Not anymore.
Since the early 2000s, large automated sky surveys, such as Pan-STARRS, ATLAS, and Catalina, have been systematically scanning the sky every clear night, photographing vast swaths of the solar system with instruments far beyond the reach of any amateur. These surveys generate an almost incomprehensible volume of image data. And for years, much of it sat underanalyzed, because there simply weren’t enough professional eyes to go through all of it.
That’s where programs like the International Astronomical Search Collaboration (IASC) come in. IASC partners with these observatories to give students and amateur astronomers access to real, unprocessed telescope data — the same images the professionals use — and trains them to search for objects that automated pipelines might have missed.
I discovered the IASC at age eleven, through a Venezuelan nonprofit foundation called Órbita CI 130, which identifies and supports young people with high abilities. One of the program’s coordinators was involved in IASC’s Venezuela chapter and invited me to join their teams. There was just one problem: the minimum age was twelve. I had to wait.
So, for the entirety of 2020, I sat in on every preparation session, every practice analysis, every mentorship call as a listener, not a participant. Watching. Learning. Preparing. The moment I turned twelve, I signed up officially.
The process: Pixels, patience, and the art of seeing movement
Here is what actually happens during an IASC asteroid search campaign.
Pan-STARRS sends me a set of images: four frames of the same patch of sky, taken at roughly equal intervals over the course of a night. The region is usually somewhere along the ecliptic. My job is to load those images into a specialized software called Astrometrica, stack them, and then scan them, methodically, for any point of light that shifts position between frames in a way that’s consistent with an orbiting solar system object.
That last part sounds simple. But it is not.
Stars don’t move, at least not perceptibly over the course of a few hours. So anything that does move is either a solar system object, a satellite, or an artifact. The challenge is distinguishing between them. Satellites cross the frame in straight lines and at predictable speeds, often leaving streaks. Cosmic rays leave single-frame flashes. Light pollution creates gradients that can mimic the soft glow of a faint object. Asteroids, by contrast, move in gentle arcs: a somewhat round, dark object, steady and easy to miss if you are not looking carefully.
When I spot a candidate, I measure its position across all four frames using Astrometrica’s astrometry tools, then compile a standardized report listing the object’s coordinates, magnitude, and time of observation. That report goes to the professional astronomers at Hardin-Simmons University, who review it and decide whether to submit the most promising candidates to the Minor Planet Center.
What happens next is largely out of my hands.
The MPC compares my reported position against its master catalog of every known solar system object. If there’s no match and the object is genuinely unrecognized, it becomes a preliminary detection. That’s the first step. But a preliminary detection alone means almost nothing. The object needs to be independently observed again within the next seven to ten days by another sky survey. If it is, the MPC upgrades it to provisional status and assigns it a designation: a year, a letter pair, a number. That designation is the object’s identity, the proof that it exists and that its discovery has been formally logged.
Most of my candidates never get that far. Out of the dozens of objects I’ve flagged across multiple campaigns, only a small fraction reached provisional status. Many were already known objects I hadn’t recognized. Others were false positives, from a bad pixel to a cosmic ray or a satellite I’d misjudged. There were entire campaigns where I came away with nothing. I lost count of the false starts long ago.
The weight of waiting
This is the part many people don’t understand about asteroid discovery.
When I tell someone I’ve discovered asteroids, they picture a dramatic moment: a flash on a screen, a sudden realization, maybe an alarm going off somewhere. The reality is almost the opposite. The work is slow, repetitive, and uncertain. You scan images for hours. You file reports. You wait days to learn if a candidate survived. Then you wait months (sometimes years) to learn if it has enough confirmed observations to be considered real in any lasting sense.
Provisional status is not the end of the journey, though. It’s barely the beginning. After an object receives a provisional designation, astronomers must accumulate enough observations to fully determine its orbit. That process typically takes six to ten years. Only once the orbit is well-characterized does the MPC assign the object a permanent number and only then is discovery credit officially assigned.
I submitted my first provisional discovery in December 2021. I received word that it had been numbered in January 2026 I was studying at home when I found out. I remember sitting very still for a moment. It didn’t feel like a surprise, exactly. It felt like the end of something I hadn’t realized I’d been holding onto.
That object now has a permanent number in the MPC catalog. It has an orbit. It exists, formally and irrevocably, in the scientific record. At the moment of writing, I’m in the process of selecting a name to propose. This is a privilege extended to the discoverers of numbered asteroids, and I expect to have that name finalized by the time this article is published.
One laptop, and no excuses
I have now made eight provisional asteroid discoveries through the IASC, the first of which has been numbered. I made all of them from Venezuela, on a secondhand laptop, with an internet connection that was reliable on a good day.
The laptop deserves a mention. It was an old, inexpensive Lenovo that clearly wasn’t built with scientific image analysis in mind. Loading Astrometrica often took hours. When I tried to open large image sets, the software would freeze, crash, and lose my progress. I learned to save obsessively. I learned to work in short bursts when the machine was cooperating. I learned to plan my sessions around the rolling power cuts that are a feature of daily life in Venezuela, because missing a report deadline because the power went out was not an acceptable reason to miss a report deadline.
None of this is meant as a complaint. I say it because it’s part of the story, and because I think it matters. Asteroid science doesn’t require expensive equipment, stable electricity, or even a fast computer. It requires attention. It requires the willingness to look at the same noisy, pixelated images for hours and keep asking: Is that something?
What we’re really doing
The readers of this magazine know something that most people don’t: that rocks from space are not abstractions. They land. They leave marks. They carry within them material older than the Earth itself, and when dedicated hunters trek out to a strewn field in Germany or a dry lake bed in the American Southwest to recover a freshly fallen meteorite, they are doing the genuinely scientific job of preserving a piece of the solar system’s history before it weathers away.
I think about that when I study and work. These asteroids I find are not falling; most of them are in stable orbits in the main belt, between Mars and Jupiter, and they’ll be there for millions of years. But they are the same class of object. The same ancient material. Some fraction of Earth’s meteorites, before they fell, were once asteroids that someone, somewhere, might have observed drifting through a telescope’s field of view.
The meteorite hunters in this issue found things that had already arrived. I’m trying to find the ones that are still out there.
It’s the same impulse, I think — this need to pay attention to what’s falling through the solar system, to put a name to it, to say: I saw this. This was here. It just operates on a slightly different timescale.
