Since 1980 Claudio Bottari (b. 1960) has been interested in the technical aspects of amateur astronomy and in 1991 was among the first to use CCDs in the Italian amateur community. At the Mira observatory he uses a 0.6-m concentric Schmidt-Cassegrain in search of SNe and NEOs. He discovered SN 1996ai in NGC 5005.
Discovered on 7-8-2001 in San Marcello by Tesi, L., Tombelli, M.