A self-taught Russian amateur astronomer named Filipp Romanov has been finding asteroids that NASA-funded sky-surveys missed — including a near-Earth asteroid he spotted in February 2026 before any of the professional systems noticed it — working from a village on Russia's Sea of Japan coast, and naming each new asteroid he finds after one of his great-grandparents

The discovery happened on a Sunday evening. On 15 February 2026, Filipp Romanov was at his laptop in his grandparents’ old house in Yuzhno-Morskoy, a coastal village near Nakhodka in the Primorsky Krai region of Far Eastern Russia, reviewing images he had requested through a remote-access programme from the 2-metre Liverpool Telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma in the Canary Islands. He had originally requested the observations to confirm the position of a known main-belt asteroid — a routine bit of astrometry that helps refine the orbits of catalogued objects. What he noticed in the images was something else. A second faint object, far smaller than the target, was moving across the field at approximately 18 arcseconds per minute. The motion was fast enough to suggest the object was close to Earth — much closer than a main-belt asteroid would be — and faint enough, at magnitude +20, to have escaped detection by the large automated sky surveys that have, over the past decade, increasingly come to dominate the discovery of small solar-system bodies.

According to Universe Today’s coverage of the discovery, Romanov made astrometric measurements of the object and submitted them to the Minor Planet Center’s NEO Confirmation Page under the temporary designation RFD0284. A few hours later, the McDonald Observatory in Texas — alerted by the submission — tracked the asteroid and confirmed its trajectory. The object, now formally designated 2026 CQ3, was classified as a member of the Amor group of near-Earth asteroids, on a trajectory that approaches Earth’s orbit from outside but does not cross it. Initial orbit calculations indicated that 2026 CQ3 had passed approximately 8 million kilometres from Earth on 13 February 2026 — about 20 times the distance to the Moon, close in astronomical terms but well outside the range that would pose any impact risk. The asteroid measured between 15 and 50 metres in diameter, in the same size class as the Chelyabinsk meteor of 2013, but in this case on a trajectory that took it past Earth rather than into the atmosphere.

How an amateur outpaces the sky surveys

The phrase “amateur astronomer” carries, for most people, an image of someone with a small telescope in a backyard observing the planets through the eyepiece. The actual practice of advanced amateur astronomy in the 2020s is substantially different from that image. Romanov, like a growing number of contemporary amateurs working at the frontier of small-object discovery, does not primarily use a telescope he owns or has built himself. He uses time on professional-class telescopes around the world — accessed through paid remote-observation programmes such as the Liverpool Telescope’s amateur access scheme and the iTelescope.net network of robotic instruments in Utah, Chile, Australia, and Spain. His workflow involves calculating the celestial coordinates he wants to image, requesting a sequence of exposures (typically 15 frames of 60 seconds each for asteroid-search work), waiting for the images to come back over the internet, and then examining them carefully for any objects that have moved between frames.

As reported by a 2025 Universe Today interview with Romanov about his earlier discoveries, the competitive niche for contemporary amateurs in the era of Pan-STARRS, ATLAS, and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is finding objects in the gaps that the large automated surveys leave open. The professional surveys cover enormous fractions of the sky every night, but they cannot cover everything continuously, and there are always patches of sky — particularly those recently covered or under unfavourable conditions for the major facilities — where a careful amateur with good timing and patience can find something the surveys have missed. Romanov consults the Minor Planet Center’s Sky Coverage Plots database to identify these gaps, requests observations of promising regions, and works through the resulting images by eye to find moving objects. The methodology is labour-intensive and produces, by professional-survey standards, a small number of discoveries. But the discoveries it does produce are real — and 2026 CQ3 is now the second near-Earth asteroid Romanov has personally identified, after his first such find (2024 QS) two years earlier.

The names

The aspect of Romanov’s work that has attracted the most popular attention, beyond the discoveries themselves, is what he has done with the naming rights that come with formal discovery credit. The International Astronomical Union grants the discoverer of a new minor planet the privilege of proposing its permanent name, subject to IAU approval. Romanov has used this privilege, repeatedly, to honour his four great-grandparents — none of whom were public figures, none of whom were astronomers, and none of whom would otherwise have any chance of being remembered by anyone beyond their immediate descendants for more than another generation or two.

Per EarthSky’s coverage of the IAU naming approvals, the four great-grandparents now have asteroids carrying their names. Asteroid 623826 Alekseyvarkin commemorates Aleksey Makarovich Varkin (1923-1986), who was wounded rescuing horses during World War II and raised three children after his pregnant wife was killed in a bus accident in 1962. Asteroid 623827 Nikandrilyich commemorates Nikandr Ilyich Romanov (1916-1999), a Chuvash man who studied at veterinary and military schools, worked as a foreman after military service, and kept bees as a hobby. Asteroid 679999 Mariyavarkina commemorates Mariya Maksimovna Varkina (1922-1962), Aleksey’s wife, who died in the bus accident at age 40. Asteroid 679996 Mariyafilippovna commemorates Mariya Filippovna Romanova (1919-1979), who worked as a secretary-typist and clerk in Chuguyevka and received a Veteran of Labour medal. None of these names existed in the historical record at any scale beyond family memory before Romanov proposed them. They now exist in the IAU minor planet catalogue, attached to specific orbital objects, in a permanent form that will outlast any human institution likely to remember the four people the names commemorate.

What this means for the future of the field

As Romanov himself has argued in a 2022 paper he self-published on arXiv on the contribution of the modern amateur astronomer to the science of astronomy, the era of significant amateur contribution to observational astronomy is not over. It has, instead, migrated to the internet. The 2026 CQ3 discovery is one data point in a substantially larger pattern in which amateur astronomers around the world — working from home computers, using remote-access time on professional telescopes, consulting open databases of survey coverage, and submitting their findings to the same Minor Planet Center that handles professional submissions — continue to produce real scientific discoveries at the margins of the field that the large automated surveys have come to dominate. Romanov’s current discovery tally includes 82 variable stars, 10 planetary nebula candidates, several supernovae and novae in nearby galaxies, four possible binary stars, and an expanding collection of asteroids. The work is being done at a kitchen table in a small village in Far Eastern Russia, by a 27-year-old without a university degree, using telescopes that physically sit thousands of kilometres away on volcanic peaks in the Canary Islands and the high deserts of the American West. The combination is the modern shape of what an amateur astronomer can be.