Due to the concerns all of you guys had regarding why we launched our pools at 12:00a.m. UTC, our wallets at 1:30a.m. UTC instead of at the planned time of 5a.m. UTC, we felt the need to directly address these concerns to reassure you in Astrocoin. First of all, to all the accusations out there that this early pool launch was somehow an "inside job" or was only for the "inside" people is utter and complete nonsense. In fact, we tweeted exactly 1 hour before we launched the pools that we would do so, the tweet can be found here: https://twitter.com/ASRCoin/status/425764202620280833

Up till that point, a little less than 1.5% of total supply (less than 3100 coins) were pre-mined. At 12 a.m. UTC, we notified the IRC channel on irc.altcoinweb.com #astrocoin and we updated the bitcointalk forum thread here, but it now appears not many paid attention. There were over 30 miners after the first minute of launch and it was a fair start, if you want confirmation, step into the IRC room and verify for yourself. The wallets were soon released 1.5h later at 1:30am UTC. We do understand your concerns and we are sorry for not being transparent enough, but under the given circumstances of that time, we were forced to launch the coin sooner than the initial given launch time. We believe in Astrocoin and our faith remains in it. We've reached a total network hashrate of over 500MH/s within the first few hours of launch, with hundreds of miners and thousands of wallet downloads. We are in the works with some very exciting projects with several people and will be launching services and site where you can use your Astrocoins. We are in the talks with several exchanges and plan to be publicly tradable in the near future looking forward in the next few weeks. We apologize once again if there was any misunderstanding of our intentions or if we caused you to doubt in us. We thank you for all your continued support and we look forward in patience and hope to the very exciting days ahead of us.

Sounds improbable, no offense.
Can you please provide more detailed description of events that made you think so. Thank you.

Novacoin hasn't been to $20 before, this is correct. I didn't mean that those orders were in the book before today. What I meant is that somebody uses a trading bot to create those orders on the fly (they would be very tedious to enter manually). He's been doing it for a long time and I don't think anybody pays much attention to it, I certainly don't. It's the big orders that move the market.

In case you didn't know it, you can view a larger part of the order book here than on BTC-e itself:

http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/orderbook.php?pair=nvc-btc&market=btc-e
http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/orderbook.php?pair=nvc-usd&market=btc-e

BTC-e got the "premine" then publicly destroyed it.

What do you mean? The repeated small orders? They've always been there. It's probably somebody playing with a trading bot.