Distant asteroid named Colleenohare for amateur B.C. astronomer

For amateur astronomer Colleen O'Hare in Kelowna, B.C., it's a beautiful part of life to know an asteroid somewhere far away in the universe is now her namesake.

The Paris-based International Astronomical Union (IAU) announced last month that an asteroid located between Mars and Jupiter had been named Colleenohare in her honour.

O'Hare, a retired medical laboratory technologist, doesn't have a full academic degree in astronomy, but she says she took some astronomy courses at Okanagan College and has since continued to read and learn about the universe. 

She became a member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC) Okanagan Centre club in 2004, and over the years she has been organizing the club's outreach activities, which include setting up telescopes in parking lots and other public spaces for people to watch the beauty of planets and bright stars.

"I just found it so amazing to talk to people about the universe, so I just kept doing more and more outreach and became the outreach coordinator [for the club]," she told CBC's Alya Ramadan.

O'Hare says she has never seen the Colleenohare asteroid, which is 11 kilometres in diameter located 250 million kilometres away from Earth, somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. It takes more than five years to orbit the sun.

She was surprised when she realized a member of her club had nominated her for the distinction.

"It's totally shocking — you shouldn't be rewarded for things that you just love doing." 

Naming an asteroid

According to IAU's monthly bulletin published on Feb. 7, Colleenohare, previously numbered (10096) 1991 RK5, was discovered by American astronomer Henry E. Holt at the Palomar Observatory in California on Sept. 13, 1991.

The non-governmental organization promoting astronomical research and education has specific naming guidelines for asteroids, minor planets, asteroid-comet hybrids and their satellites. They must have a sufficiently well-known orbit and have already been numbered by the union. 

Scientists and even mythological characters could be asteroid names, but in terms of format, a name should be limited to 16 Latin characters, shouldn't have any numbers, and shouldn't have spaces, hyphens, apostrophes and capital letters in between.

Besides O'Hare, the IAU named four asteroids after Canadians in the same bulletin, including calling (10109) 1992 KQ Sidhu after Jaskarn Singh Sidhu, RASC member in Victoria, B.C.; and (10097) 1991 RV16 as Humbroncos after Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team members who died in a bus crash in Saskatchewan in April 2018.

Former RASC Okanagan Centre president David Hawkins says he nominated O'Hare two years ago when IAU was taking applications for names of people who encourage public interest in science. 

"Colleen is the perfect person, because she did so much outreach working with the public, and I thought she deserved that honour," Hawkins said. 

"She's going to go to schools and libraries, give lectures and talks … and she also gives presentations at the Okanagan Observatory."

Hawkins says O'Hare is a founder of the Okanagan Observatory, located about four kilometres from the Big White Ski Resort near Kelowna, and she normally visits there Friday nights from spring to fall every year to talk about astronomy.