In this amazing video of the solar system, the asteroids that were discovered from 1980 to 2010 appear in the sequence as they were discovered. It's very cool to watch the process of discovery. You can observe patterns, as technological innovations come online and spur new batches of findings; and as groups of astronomers all look in the same direction at once -- for instance, when Voyager passed Jupiter, a lot of asteroids suddenly started to be discovered around that region of space.