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

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 obs…