Nice work by a kiwi amateur!
http://www.stuff.co.nz/science/30063...id-before-NASA
It was nearly 2am one day last month when Ms McCormick decided to ditch the planet hunt in her home observatory and measure the position and orbit of a comet.
"I was measuring away and feeling tired, so I thought I'd better check the data," she says.
"I'm looking at the cometary data and there was this little thing moving through the field that I thought shouldn't be there."
She promptly sent the object's co-ordinates to double check with the American database.
Sure enough, no one had seen it before.