Please realize that an asteroid is not a star! Asteroids are few, and live in the solar system. Light from Asteroid Claerbout reaches earth in as little as 16 minutes.

Any number of hucksters will sell you the right to name a star. Light from an average star in the Milky Way Galaxy takes 50,000 years to arrive on earth. There are a billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, few with names. Billions of galaxies too. You too can sell names for stars.

At The Minor Planet Center (MPC) of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory they have a committee and lots of rules for getting your asteroid named, should you find one. One rule, should you find an asteroid and want to name it after someone is they must not know about this fact until after the approval.

Asteroid citations are brief but can make for curious reading. To see about 80 of them, grab this PDF file and look near the bottom. Among the 80 listed there you should also find the citation for asteroid Claerbout.

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