AstronomerCharlieKowal was on Mount Palomar, photographing the sky around Jupiter with a 48-inch telescope on three successive nights.
Unfortunately, follow-up observations were not made, possibly due to the new object's faintness (it was twice as faint as Leda), and possibly because time on the telescope was in heavy demand for other research.
In retrospect, it was astounding that Kowal had photographed it at all, a quarter-century before any Jovian moon of comparable inconspicuousness.
The discovery of Quaoar is not so much a triumph of advanced optics as of modern digital analysis and a deliberate search methodology.
In fact, Quaoar apparently was first photographed in 1982 by then-Caltech astronomerCharlieKowal in a search for the postulated "Planet X." Kowal unfortunately never found the object on the plate--much less Planet X--but left the image for posterity.
Because the precise location of Quaoar on the old plates is highly predictable, the orbit is thought to be quite circular for a solar system body, and far more circular than that of Pluto.
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