ARCOLA - At Arcola High School, students are working with a professional astronomer on a project intended to help scientists spot asteroids on a collision course with Earth.

"It's pretty intense," said senior Saul Sanchez. "You could find near-Earth objects (and) you get the satisfaction of seeing them move."

As part of the NASA-funded Killer Asteroid Project, the Arcola physics students are joining those from about 70 other high schools and colleges from around the world in analyzing images captured by the large, homemade telescope at Robert Holmes' Astronomical Research Institute in rural Charleston.

A full-time contractor for NASA, Holmes tracks asteroids and other celestial objects identified by the space agency. And thanks to the wonders of digital photography and the Internet, he's got a lot of volunteer help.

The thousands of digital images taken by his telescope are available online to students at participating schools, who use free software to create time-lapse series of photos.

Viewed in rapid sequence, these pictures of star fields effectively become animated, making the detection and tracking of objects in the solar system a simple matter of locating and measuring the moving dots.

The data is forwarded to Harvard University, where experts use it to compute the orbits of all the various celestial objects.

There's an outside chance the students will spot previously unknown objects and get credit for it from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Minor Planet Center at Harvard. In fact, three asteroids "discovered" by Arcola students will be named after their school, Holmes said.

"I think it's pretty cool, finding an asteroid, naming it after ourselves," said senior Justin Pullen.

Arcola's participation is part of the astronomy unit in Jesse Durdel's physics class, which also will study the origins of the solar system and the universe.

In 2006, Holmes completed construction of his "astrograph" telescope in rural Charleston. A curved, 32-inch-diameter mirror at the base of the telescope captures and focuses light on what is basically a digital camera mounted at the top of the device.

He has found more than 250 asteroids, and came upon his first undiscovered comet in July.

At NASA, scientists peruse images from their own telescopes, which monitor the skies in predetermined search patterns, in order to locate asteroids and the occasional comet. Each night, NASA assigns a list of these objects for Holmes and his student helpers to track.