1846 Bengt
1846 Bengt, provisional designation, is a dark asteroid from the inner regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 11 kilometers in diameter. Discovered by the Palomar–Leiden survey in 1960, it was named for Danish astronomer Bengt Strömgren.
Discovery
Bengt was discovered on 24 September 1960, by Dutch astronomer couple Ingrid [van Houten-Groeneveld|Ingrid] and Cornelis van Houten in collaboration with Tom Gehrels, who took the photographic plates at Palomar Observatory in California.The survey designation "P-L" stands for Palomar–Leiden, named after Palomar Observatory and Leiden Observatory, which collaborated on the fruitful Palomar–Leiden survey in the 1960s. Gehrels used Palomar's Samuel Oschin telescope, and shipped the photographic plates to Ingrid and Cornelis van Houten at Leiden Observatory where astrometry was carried out. The trio are credited with several thousand asteroid discoveries.
The asteroid was first identified as at McDonald Observatory in 1951. The observation arc starts 3 years prior to its official discovery observation, with its first used identification made at Goethe Link Observatory in 1957.