Asteroid 115492 Watonga is named to honor the town in Oklahoma where I was born and raised.
Watonga is located on former Cheyenne and Arapaho Indian Reservation lands that were allotted to individual tribal members and the excess opened to white settlers in the Land Run of 1892, and is named after Arapaho Chief Watonga, whose name means "Black Coyote.”
Currently in Gemini lingering just above the setting Sun at magnitude 20.9, this object has a diameter of about 4 miles.
Orbiting our Sun once every 5.7 years at an average diatance of 3.2 AU (384 million miles), this is a Main-Belt asteroid between Mars and Jupiter.
Watonga is a city in Blaine County, Oklahoma. It is 70 miles northwest of Oklahoma City. The population was 5,111 at the 2010 census. It is the county seat of Blaine County.
I first saw this object on October 23, 2003 at magnitude 19.0, (about 1 million times fainter than what we can see with the naked eye), and over the course of the next 30 days, I sent 17 measurements to the Minor Planet Center at Harvard University.
When the number 115492 was assigned, this became my 26th asteroid discovery.
The orbit of 115492 Watonga has been measured 590 times by more than a dozen different observatories, with archived data going back to November 24, 1998.
Data Courtesy SkySafari 6 Pro, Wikipedia, NASA, JPL