Donating a minor planet during GAM2017

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Apr 20

2017

by Johannes Stübler

Yesterday, April 19th 2017, I had the pleasure to organize a very special event during GAM2017. Our local astronomical society (LAG) is running an observatory outpost in the northernwest countryside of Linz. This outpost is situated in the municipal area of Gramastetten. They host us for more than 20 years, so we decided to say officially thankyou to the local municipal and to all people there supporting us, especially our local landlord, an organic farmer who is supporing us in any matters for decades. How should we do this ? What's a convenient gift for this? ...... Right ! Naming a celestial body after Gramastetten would be fine, assumed to have one ..... so, we had ;-) .... and after passing the usual procedure of IAU-MinorPlanetCenter and a lot of time to wait we got the OK :-)

Yesterday we donated a kind of certificate, approving the official entry of "Gramastetten" in the JPL small body database, to the local municipal, represented by the mayor Mag. Andreas Fazeni. He was very happy and proud because of this honor.

This evening we presented an accompanying programm. I told something about GAM and AWB and of course everything about the history and developement of the local observatory outpost. My friend Erich Meyer, one of the discoverers (E.Meyer, H.Raab,E.Obermair) of this minorplanet, told something about hunting minor planets. It was a succesful event and even local medias reported about this.

Following some picts showing our little observatory site:

Regards

Joe