Two Estes Park High School students have discovered an asteroid no one ever noticed before in an innovative class taught by the school's science teacher, Todd Burke. Jove Darnell, a sophomore, and senior Christopher Moody are taking the scientific research class.

"Usually, schoolwork is tests, or some class work, but in this class, we do more professional work that scientists have not done previously," Darnell explained.

For this particular project, he and Moody search databases that are either public, or that the school can get permission to use to "collect data that they have, but that has never been studied before," Darnell explained.

"We go over that data and sometimes we'll make scientific discoveries and release it to places like the Minor Planet Center."

The MPC is the official organization responsible for tracking and naming asteroids.

He and Moody are "specifically looking for asteroids," Darnell said. "We collect pictures that were taken from a telescope in Hawaii. We get four pictures in the set that we look at and compare the pictures," he explained.

Using the program Astrometrica, the four pictures in a star set are overlapped and then the program "blinks" between them to determine if an object is moving in a straight line.

"If it is moving in a straight direction, we click on the object and compare it to an online database that contains known objects in the universe," Darnell said. "If it's unmarked (previously unrecorded), we have to mark it in each of the frames. We generate a report and send it off to MPC."

If the object is not moving in straight line, that may be indication of interference, he said.

"In the images we get, they are not color images they are just radio waves," Darnell said. "If there is an object at one point and in the next frame we see it move, and then in the next frame we see it an object that is the same, but it's not in the same line that we are looking at, it could just be a flash of interference that's not really the object that we are looking at. There are some cases where an object might be orbiting around something, but we haven't ever seen one of those, those are extremely rare. We're just looking for asteroids that are clearly visible. "

"Our class as whole participated in the initial campaign, which lasted about three weeks in September," explained Moody at a presentation on December 15 to the Estes Park R3 School District board meeting.

"Then Jove and I continued on to make a video tutorial of the process to help future students to be able to continue to participate in this search. Then we moved on to the second campaign which ended about two weeks ago."

Although the class found several unmarked objects, only one has turned out to be unknown - at least initially. The process to determine whether the asteroid is truly previously unknown - and whether or not the object can be officially named the Darnell-Moody (or Moody-Darnell) asteroid can take five to seven years.

"This is definitely professional-level research," noted Burke.