Kumamori

Kumamori is asteroid #8104 and also known as 1994 BW4. Kumamori was discovered by Kobayashi Takao (小林 隆男) at the Ooizumi Observatory. Kumamori is a member of the Hirayama-family Eos.

Kumamori is named after a planetarium educator and telescope maker. The official naming citation states:

Teruaki Kumamori (b. 1949), planetarium educator of Sakai City Culture Center, Osaka, is an expert in telescope making and has made Wright-Väisälä, Dall-Kirkham, Schiefspiegler and other optics in addition to mechanical parts for them. He also takes high-resolution digital movies of the planets.

[Ref: Minor Planet Circ. 50248]

Yet he seems to be already forgotten everywhere else. I can’t find anything on him. I can easily guess that his correct Japanese name is Kumamori Teruaki (熊森 輝昭) because these syllables don’t offer many possibilities. But a search in Japanese also brings no real results. I find only a Japanese bear & forest society this way. This at least allows to focus on the name only. Kumamori (熊森) literally means bear-forest. It isn’t a common term and hence has no fix meaning in Japanese, but could also mean bears and forests or something similar. Fix is only that kuma (熊) means bear and mori (森) means forest. So Kumamori is another asteroid of the bear theme. I think that it represents territories, in particular territories of wild animals.

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