Earlier this year, on a February night, a 28-year-old man in the Russian Far East asked a two-metre telescope on a volcanic ridge in the Canary Islands to take fifteen photographs of one patch of sky, sixty seconds each. He was roughly 6,800 miles away from the instrument and had never been anywhere near it. When the frames came back he laid them in order and looked for the one point of light that had moved while everything around it stayed still. Something had. Within hours it had a temporary label, RFD0284, on a public web page that professional astronomers refresh like a trading screen. Within a day it had a permanent name, 2026 CQ3, a near-Earth asteroid somewhere between the size of a house and the size of an office block.
The man is Filipp Romanov. He lives in Nakhodka, a port town on the Sea of Japan coast of Primorsky Krai. He is self-taught. He has no degree in astronomy and, more to the point, he has no telescope. Every object he has ever found, and the list now runs to 82 variable stars, ten planetary nebula candidates, three novae in other galaxies, three supernovae and thirteen asteroids, he found on somebody else’s glass, booked in slices, from a desk thousands of miles from the mirror.
That is a genuinely new way to do this, and it is worth understanding why, because it explains both how he got there and why almost nobody else has.
For most of the history of the subject, finding a new object in the solar system was something an amateur could reasonably hope to do. You needed patience, dark skies, a decent instrument and a tolerance for cold. People found comets from their gardens. The famous ones have their names on things because of it. Then, over about twenty years, the professionals took the sky. Automated survey systems now sweep the whole visible sky on a repeating cycle, night after night, with wide-field cameras and software that flags anything that shifts between frames. Catalina, Pan-STARRS, ATLAS and the rest find the overwhelming majority of near-Earth objects now. They are not better observers than amateurs. They are simply everywhere, every night, and they never get tired or bored or clouded out in the same place twice.
The honest consequence is that the garden-telescope discovery became close to impossible. Not forbidden, just arithmetically unlikely. If a machine photographs the entire sky every few nights, the odds that you personally will be the first human being to notice any given moving dot collapse.
What Romanov does is a third thing, and it did not exist as an option for most of the past century. Professional observatories increasingly sell or grant remote observing time. You submit a request, specifying coordinates, exposure length, filter and number of frames. A queue scheduler somewhere decides when conditions suit your request, the telescope points itself, the shutter opens, and the data lands in your account. You never touch the dome. You never see the mountain. For the February discovery he used the Liverpool Telescope, a two-metre reflector at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, operated by the Astrophysics Research Institute at Liverpool John Moores University. Its station identifier in the international records is J13. He has also worked the iTelescope network, which has instruments in the Utah desert and in Australia.
So the skill is not in the optics any more. It is in the choosing. Romanov’s method, by his own account of earlier finds, is to work out where the automated surveys are not looking. The surveys publish what they have covered. Sky near the moon, sky at awkward elevations, sky close to the horizon in the hour before dawn, sky in a band the machines happened to skip while chasing something else: these are the gaps. You find a gap, you buy fifteen minutes, and you point the borrowed mirror into it.
Fifteen sixty-second exposures is a specific and deliberate choice. Shorter and a small, faint object does not register at all. Longer and anything moving fast enough to be nearby smears into a streak and stops being measurable as a point. Sixty seconds, repeated, gives you a stack of still frames in which a solar system object betrays itself by drifting a measurable distance against the fixed stars. Blink them in sequence and the thing walks across the screen. That is the entire trick, and it has not changed since photographic plates. What has changed is that the plates arrive by internet from another hemisphere.
The next part is where the clock starts, and it is the part most people do not know about. A single night of observations is not a discovery. It is a candidate. Fifteen frames spanning about twenty minutes give you an arc so short that the object’s orbit is barely constrained at all, and a near-Earth candidate that is not followed up within a day or two can simply be lost, because the uncertainty in where it should be next grows faster than anyone can search.
So the Minor Planet Center, which is the clearing house for all of this, runs the Near-Earth Object Confirmation Page. New candidates go up there with a temporary designation and a predicted position, and observatories around the world pick them off. Romanov’s object went up as RFD0284. The window is hours, not weeks, and whether a candidate survives depends entirely on whether somebody else with clear sky and a free instrument decides to look.
Somebody did. Later the same day, Peter Birtwhistle, working a 0.41-metre Schmidt-Cassegrain at Great Shefford in England, got three measurements. The following night a 0.61-metre telescope at Cerro Tololo in Chile, with observers listed as T. Linder, R. Holmes and L. Hutton, added three more. That is how the chain closed: a Russian amateur on a British-run telescope in Spanish territory, confirmed by a private observatory in southern England and a research instrument in the Andes, inside about thirty hours.
The published circular, MPEC 2026-D07, carries the formal record. Twenty-four astrometric measurements, and an asterisk on one line marking the discovery observation. The asterisk sits on Romanov’s first frame.
The name it ended up with is not arbitrary either, and it encodes the whole sequence. In 2026 CQ3, the year is obvious. The first letter records the half-month in which the object was found, and C is the first half of February. The second letter and the trailing numeral record its place in the queue for that fortnight, counting through the alphabet with the letter I left out to avoid confusion with the digit one, then starting again with a tally of how many times the alphabet has been exhausted. Q with a 3 after it works out to the ninety-first minor planet designated from the first two weeks of February 2026. So the label itself tells you that in the fortnight Romanov went looking, ninety other new rocks were catalogued, most of them by the machines. His is the one that got there by hand.
Here is the detail that complicates the simple version of this story, and it deserves saying plainly rather than being tidied away. The same circular contains two measurements made five days earlier, on 10 February, by the Mt. Lemmon Survey in Arizona, with D. Rankin listed as observer. The machine had the object. Photons from 2026 CQ3 landed in a professional survey camera almost a week before an amateur in Nakhodka ever pointed at it. Those two lines were matched to the object afterwards, which is routine: once an orbit exists, archives get searched for earlier sightings, and recovering them is valuable because it lengthens the arc and sharpens the orbit.
But the machine did not flag it as new. It photographed it and moved on. The discovery credit in the official record goes to the observation that was recognised and reported, and that one is Romanov’s. The accurate way to put it is not that he beat the surveys to the sky. He beat them to the realisation.
It is also worth being honest about what sort of object this is, because the easy version of asteroid stories is not the true one here. 2026 CQ3’s absolute magnitude is about 25.5, which is the only size information anyone has. Converting brightness into diameter requires guessing how reflective the surface is, and that guess spans a wide range for small rocky bodies. Assume a dark surface and you get something near fifty metres across. Assume a bright one and you get nearer fifteen. Nobody has measured it, and nobody is likely to, so the honest answer is a range, and the range is the answer rather than a failure to produce a number.
Its orbit is now reasonably well described. It goes round the sun once every 503 days, comes no closer to the sun than about 1.02 times Earth’s distance, and is tilted a little over twenty-one degrees out of the plane of the planets. That combination puts it in the class called Amor, which matters more than it sounds: Amor asteroids approach Earth’s orbit from outside but do not actually cross it. The closest the two orbits come to each other is a little over five percent of the distance from Earth to the sun, which in human units is around five million miles.
It had already used that approach. On 13 February, two days before Romanov photographed it, 2026 CQ3 passed Earth at about 0.054 of the Earth-sun distance, roughly five million miles, moving at around eleven and a half kilometres per second. That is twenty times further away than the moon. It was never going to do anything. It was already on its way out when it was found, which is the slightly deflating and completely honest shape of most small near-Earth discoveries: they are brightest, and therefore findable, precisely when they are nearest, and by the time anyone has confirmed them they are receding.
The orbit is built on 51 measurements over a twelve-day arc, which is enough to say where it will be in a decade and not enough to say much with precision beyond that. On current numbers it comes back on 18 February 2037, at about 0.16 of the Earth-sun distance, which is three times further off than last time. Eleven years is a long wait for a second look at a rock the size of a building.
None of which is really why this story holds. The reason it holds is the geography, and the names.
Romanov has had four asteroids officially named, and he did not name them for himself. 623826 Alekseyvarkin and 623827 Nikandrilyich were approved by the international naming body in 2023. 679996 Mariyafilippovna and 679999 Mariyavarkina followed the next year. They are his great-grandparents. Four people who lived in the Russian Far East and are now attached, permanently and in the official catalogue, to four objects between Mars and Jupiter that will still be there when every record of the family has crumbled. He has also put names on the catalogue for the telescopes and observatories that lent him time, which, when you think about what he is actually doing, is a fairly precise kind of thanks.
He has said that he studies and popularises astronomy for free, and that he intends to go to university for it. He was 28 at the time of the February discovery and had not done so yet.
It would be easy to make this into a parable about the little guy beating the system, and that is not what happened. The system is what made it possible. Without professional remote-observing programmes, a self-taught observer with no instrument in Primorsky Krai would have no way into this at all. Without the Minor Planet Center’s confirmation page, his fifteen frames would have been a curiosity on a hard drive. Without a man in a garden observatory in England choosing to spend part of an evening on a stranger’s unconfirmed dot, the object would have been lost by morning and nobody would ever have known it existed.
What he supplied was the one thing none of the machines have. He decided where to look, he looked at what came back, and he understood what he was seeing fast enough to tell someone while it still mattered.
The asteroid is catalogued now. It has a number, a period, a class and a return date, and it will keep all of them whether anyone watches or not. In February 2037 it will come back round, further out and fainter, and somewhere in the archives the first line that anyone recognised will still have an asterisk on it, next to a station code for a telescope its discoverer has never seen.