Between January and June 2020, as COVID-19 was sweeping the world, an amateur astronomer living in the province of Brindisi in southern Italy made a series of exhilarating discoveries.

Giuseppe Donatiello was poring over images made public by the Dark Energy Survey (DES), which had scanned the southern sky from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Amid the smattering of stars, gas, and dust, he noticed first one, then two, then three new satellites of the Sculptor Galaxy (NGC 253). Dwarf-size and spheroidal in shape, they had been overlooked by the algorithm set up to spot them.