Here is my data from that night. This is what a night's observations becomes after a few hours of hard work processing it:
COD 735 CON William G. Dillon, 4703 Birkenhead Circle, Missouri City, TX 77459, USA CON [Asteroid-Team@yahoogroups.com] OBS J. Dellinger MEA J. Dellinger NET USNO-A2.0 TEL 0.46m f/4.5 Newtonian + CCD BND R ACK 2003 HN15 and -31 Dec search fields. OBS disc if unknown. F35281 * C2003 05 28.17977 16 38 39.59 -06 56 00.0 17.5 R 735 F35281 C2003 05 28.19801 16 38 37.85 -06 56 18.1 17.6 R 735 F35281 C2003 05 28.27449 16 38 30.57 -06 57 33.1 16.7 R 735 F35282 * C2003 05 28.18284 16 39 36.06 -07 07 08.4 18.5 R 735 F35282 C2003 05 28.19161 16 39 35.54 -07 07 10.7 19.3 R 735 F35282 C2003 05 28.27449 16 39 30.29 -07 07 33.2 18.4 R 735 F35283 * C2003 05 28.19161 16 39 47.23 -07 14 13.9 17.2 R 735 F35283 C2003 05 28.20197 16 39 46.58 -07 14 12.3 17.4 R 735 F35283 C2003 05 28.21321 16 39 45.92 -07 14 10.1 17.4 R 735 F35284 * C2003 05 28.18284 16 40 03.76 -07 10 29.1 18.5 R 735 F35284 C2003 05 28.20197 16 40 02.84 -07 10 24.3 18.1 R 735 F35284 C2003 05 28.27449 16 39 59.33 -07 10 07.8 18.3 R 735 F35285 * C2003 05 28.23331 14 49 04.62 -31 04 20.8 18.1 R 735 F35285 C2003 05 28.25013 14 49 03.74 -31 04 20.5 17.9 R 735 F35285 C2003 05 28.25948 14 49 03.16 -31 04 20.0 18.5 R 735 F35286 * C2003 05 28.22618 14 48 11.74 -31 06 18.1 17.4 R 735 F35286 C2003 05 28.23331 14 48 11.37 -31 06 14.1 17.3 R 735 F35286 C2003 05 28.24080 14 48 10.95 -31 06 10.0 17.2 R 735 F35287 * C2003 05 28.22618 14 49 35.91 -31 16 38.4 17.0 R 735 F35287 C2003 05 28.23331 14 49 35.57 -31 16 35.1 16.9 R 735 F35287 C2003 05 28.24080 14 49 35.19 -31 16 31.7 16.8 R 735 F35288 * C2003 05 28.25013 14 48 42.90 -31 16 49.6 17.1 R 735 F35288 C2003 05 28.25948 14 48 42.47 -31 16 46.1 17.0 R 735The first column is a unique identifier that each observatory gets to make up for itself. We used "F" for "Fort Bend Astronomy Club", then a single digit for the year (3 = 2003), then the month (5 = May), then the day of the month (28), then a character for each object observed. "Claerbout" was object 2 that night, hence "F35282". The "C" just means "CCD camera", then the year, month, and day (to the nearest second). Then the Right Ascencion (RA) in hours, minutes, seconds, then the Declination (Dec) in degrees, minutes, and seconds. Then the brightness, a letter indicating what color the observation is sensitive to (for our CCD camera R for "Red"), then the observatory's code (we are "735").
If you bring up http://www.minorplanetcenter.org/iau/MPEph/MPEph.html and type in Claerbout and check "MPC 8 line" and "show residuals" you can see a list of the observations used to determine the official orbit. You can see these observations from 28 May 2003 were pretty good. The "residuals" columns are date, observatory (again, "735" is us), error in RA, and error in Dec (both in arc seconds). You can think of RA as "longitude in the sky" and Dec as "latitude in the sky". Generally they want your observations to be good to within 2 arc seconds, 1 if possible.
Observations in parenthesis are outliers dropped from the orbital fit. Other team members shot the object June 1... they clearly had a problem with their clock that they didn't catch!
As you can see others had imaged this object in 1997, 2000, and 2002, and even earlier in May 2003, but their nights were never closely spaced and the minor planet center didn't figure out to put the points together. We got a closely spaced set of nights from 28 May, 29 May, and 31 May, which clinched it.
Here is what we got back from the MPC after turning in that night's data:
F35281 (K00A93C F35283 (10962 F35286 (K00X07A F35287 (15925 F35288 (24030
This is basically a list of which objects they recognized. From the eight we turned in, they didn't recognize 2, 4, or 5. We attempted to get followup nights on all three, and were successful on 2 and 4. Here's how the MPC lets you know you have a discovery credit:
F35282 K03K18X F35284 K03K18Y F35291 (K03K18Y F35293 (K03K18X
This means "we recognize that F35293 is the same object as F35282 and we still don't recognize it so we are assigning the new provisional designation 2003 KX18". The lack of a left parenthesis means it's a new designation. (Hence "the dreaded left paren" meaning "not a discovery after all".) (And similarly we got a pair of nights on 2003 KY18.)