It has a hyperbolic trajectory around the Sun,[3] but still weakly bound to it by its barycenter.
[4] It was discovered on December 17, 1989 by Doug George of Kanata (near Ottawa), Ontario, Canada, and Soviet astronomer Boris Skoritchenko (Mezmay, Krasnodar Krai).
Skoritchenko was using 8×20 binoculars,[5] whilst George was using a 16" reflector and had searched for 65 hours[6].
It passed its perihelion on April 11, 1990 at a distance of 1.57 AU (235 million km),[3] and remained visible as a magnitude 9–10 object in the night sky until April 1990 C2 emission bands were observed in the comet Skorichenko-George.
[7] Its coma remained consistently diffuse, estimated to be around 190,000–290,000 km (120,000–180,000 mi) in diameter.