James V. Scotti

Scotti is the discoverer (on February 15, 1997) of 10199 Chariklo, an asteroid with two rings. This is the only known ringed asteroid and the smallest object yet discovered with a ring system.

Asteroid 3594 Scotti, discovered by Edward Bowell at Anderson Mesa Station in 1983, was named in his honor. The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on September 7, 1987 (M.P.C. 12211 ).

He has also recovered more than 75 comets starting in 1985 (since comets are subject to non-gravitational forces due to outgassing and solar wind, it is often a challenge to predict their exact position and rediscover them each time they make a new perihelion approach). He confirmed the discovery of the well known Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which impacted Jupiter in July 1994. He has also discovered the periodic comets 202P/Scotti, 244P/Scotti, 377P/Scotti, P/2010 C1 (Scotti), P/2010 H4 (Scotti), P/2010 H5 (Scotti), P/2011 A2 (Scotti), P/2013 A2 (Scotti), and P/2015 Q1 (Scotti); the later six are not yet numbered as they have only been seen at one perihelion passage. He has also discovered non-periodic comets C/2010 E5 (Scotti) and C/2010 F3 (Scotti).

James Vernon Scotti (born 1960) is an American astronomer. He was born in Bandon, Oregon and graduated from Woodway Senior High in Edmonds, Washington in 1978. He received his B.Sc. in Astronomy from the University of Arizona in Tucson in 1983. Ever since that time, he has worked on the Spacewatch project, which is one of a number of projects that look for near-Earth asteroids (NEAs). He wrote the first automatic asteroid detection software for the project in 1984.