(Michael says) I always wanted to find supernovae.  When I was a teenager working with my 8" Newtonian telescope I often looked at galaxies hoping to find that out of place star.  I never expected that I could find one.  I even wrote to Owen Gingerich at Harvard with what I thought was a find.  He kindly wrote back suggesting that I get a copy of the "Hubble Atlas of Galaxies". When I retired and reached down to pull out that dusty old dream of finding  supernovae I immediately heard about the great Rev. Robert Evans.  Thirty seven finds and I was just beginning!  I wrote to him and he kindly returned the letter with many suggestions for a successful and scientific search.  It has often been the case that the most successful of searchers in any endeavor of life are happy to share their knowledge.  How wonderful of him to confirm that again for me.

So when I went to Australia in January, 2001 on another writing assignment I made it a point to see if Rev. Evans would grant me an interview.  Luckily, he had the time and was willing.

I took the train out of Sydney station and was carried up into the Blue Mountains, a most extraordinary area.  Given that two amateur astronomers were meeting for the first time, it was fitting that it was raining.  He picked me up at the local train station and we drove to his house where I spent the day.  Bob's wife was gracious about the intrusion and also provided a wonderful midday meal.

What most people don't know about Rev. Evans is that he is deeply interested in history, especially the history of religious revivals.  Ironically his latest book specializes in those occurring in the United States in the 1830s.  He showed me his extensive library that has taken over his garage and rather than being full of astronomy books it was populated with references about religions.  People extraordinary in one area are often the same in others.

While Zwicky was the founder of modern professional supernova studies, Rev. Evans is the founder of modern amateur searching and studies.  He has literally carved the foot steps in which we all walk.  His record of 37 discoveries has still not been surpassed at the time of this writing (May, 2001) and even when it is, the real record, 33 visual discoveries, will probably never be broken.  But records aside, he opened the way for virtually all of us who love to hunt for supernovae or in some way contribute to that aspect of astronomy.  He is the father of us all and deserves the recognition and gratitude from those of us who are relatively new to the scene.

We talked nearly the entire day before I had to catch my train back, and it will be an experience that I will carry with me always, and I hope this interview allows you to get to know him just a little bit as well.  I have written 'M' where I have spoken and 'B' (for Bob) when he has.  There was virtually no editing done when this was transcribed from my microcassette recorder.

M:  Bob, can you tell me a little bit about how you became interested in astronomy?

B:  My father had been in the scouts years before I was born, and so he knew the names of a few stars and constellations.  When I was about 9 or 10 he introduced me to these things. He brought home an old star atlas from the university library and so I learned the constellations from that and started observing with a pair of binoculars.  When I was in my early teen years in high school my brother made a telescope for me out of a paper tube and a spectacle lens with a microscope eyepiece.  I didn't own a proper telescope until I left school.  At 18 or 19 years of age, that would be 1955 or '56, I bought a 2" refractor and a 5" reflecting telescope made by someone else.  This reflector was just a tube and optics - no mounting. It took me 12 months to learn how to make the thing work. I began to look at different types of objects in the sky.  In those days I was able to observe 12th magnitude objects from the roof of our house in suburban Sydney, of course the light pollution wasn't then anywhere as bad as it is now.  In the mid '50s I began to read about supernovae and considered the possibilities of supernovae hunting.  I started using the 5" telescope to look at galaxies.  The telescope enabled me to see a good many bright galaxies, but it was too small to find supernovae in more than a few dozen galaxies.  So it was about 1960 when I bought a 10" mirror to put into a telescope, but it didn't actually get made into a telescope until about 1966 after I'd been to college.  So while I had the ambitions of finding a supernova in those early days, I never had a serious chance of finding one.

M:  Had you ever thought about becoming a professional astronomer?

B:  That was not a possibility for certain reasons, one was that I felt a call to do ministerial or missionary work and also because I didn't have any great mathematical skills.  There were no jobs around in that area anyway.

M:  Why supernovae?  Why not variable stars?  Why not drawing planets?

B:  It just took my fancy.

M:  But you obviously had some idea that using what is considered today to be a very small telescope, you could even find supernovae.

B:  But with a 10" or 12" telescope I would expect to be more successful. In Australia in the 1950s a 10" or 12" telescope was a large telescope.  There were almost no amateur telescopes bigger than that.  The only way for an amateur to get a telescope bigger than that was to make it yourself and it would have cost a lot of money.  It just happened that the 10" mirror became available (it took a month's wages to buy it) and six years later before the family arrived I had a bit of spare money to buy the rest and make one that worked.

M:  Was it permanently mounted?

B:  No, no.  I'd take the tube and counterweights off, to move it in and out.

M:  Was there any relationship between your calling to evangelical work and your interest in the cosmos?

B:  Not really, no.

M:  They have always been two separate parts of your life?

B:  Astronomy is a hobby.  Obviously I have thought about science, religion and cosmology and related sorts of things but that wasn't the reason I became interested in astronomy.  In fact, some years ago I wrote a philosophy book about it, although it is only a "desk-top" production, at present.

M:  It's curious because all of us have this path through space-time and while we inevitably take one such path it is certainly only one of an infinite number of possibilities.  So when I say "Why supernovae?" there must be some reason that you considered it while there was an entire world of amateurs who apparently never gave it a thought.  There were many other amateurs with 10" and 12" telescopes but no one else took that path.  Your first supernova was in 1981, correct?

B:  As I said, I thought of looking for supernovae in the 1950's with the 5" telescope.  But, at that stage, I was really just starting to make my first observations of galaxies, any galaxies.  I knew that I was very unlikely to find a supernova until I had a larger telescope.   Zwicky had published papers on supernovae which described the magnitudes of the ones that had been found at that stage.  Only 50 or 60 supernovae had been found at that time.  Naturally, they were mostly brighter ones found with the 48" Palomar Schmidt.   The 1937 supernova in IC 4182 was 8th magnitude and a lot of the others were 10th and 12th magnitude, so there was a good possibility of seeing some of them with a 10" telescope from a reasonable site.

M:  Did you ever meet or correspond with Zwicky?

B:  At one stage, during the 1950s, I compared two photographs of NGC 1300 which had been published in different books and one of them had a photographic fault in it that looked like an over exposed star in the arm of the galaxy.  I wrote to Zwicky to point this out but it was one of his assistants who replied, Harold Gates, and said that the two photographs had probably been made from the original Palomar photograph and it was a fault in the printing process.  So Zwicky didn't actually write.

M:  I hear that he was extremely difficult to get along with.

B:  Yes, I believe that it is true.  Tom Cragg has told me a number of stories about Zwicky because Tom lived in California when Zwicky was alive.

M:  He certainly did a lot of good work, but I've heard as many stories about his abrasive personality as I have about his work.  Didn't he invent the term "supernova"?

B:  Yes, with Walter Baade.

M:  What telescope did you use for your first discovery?

B:  The 10" telescope became functional in the late 1960s.  It didn't get used much until we moved to the Lake Macquarie and Newcastle area, north of Sydney, because the place we lived in 1967 and 1968 was badly light polluted.  It was hopeless trying to observe from there.  The sky was not too bad around Lake Macquarie, and it became possible to increase the number of galaxies I observed.  There were a number of false alarms of course, in the process of learning what the galaxies look like, and also due to the fact that there were very few good reference materials.  There was only a modest range of photographs of southern galaxies available, and it was impossible for an amateur in Australia to get access to the Palomar Survey at the time, so the only thing to do with a lot of the galaxies was to make a drawing,  and hope that next time you looked you didn't get the directions (north, east, etc.) wrong.  But the difficulty too was that after I got used to seeing a galaxy a number of times I could see more details.  So my knowledge of the galaxies' appearance improved.   Each time I looked, and some detail became observable, it was possible that the new feature was a supernova.  It created quite a problem.  So there were a number of false alarms.  In addition, around 1970 there was no one to check them out.  There was no verification system.  It was nearly impossible to relate the few existing photographs to what could be seen in the telescope.

M:  It's still difficult for a lot of people trying to use different media whether it's a CCD picture against film, or film against the eye, HII regions can look star-like.  All kinds of things look different from one medium to another.

B:  So, to improve my verification system, in the early 1970s I tried to turn the 10" visual telescope into a photographic telescope.  That was like trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear and it didn't work.  So I gave up for the most part until 1980 when the news came about the supernova in M100 found visually by Gus Johnson.

M:  So that was a particularly inspirational moment?  You thought, "Ah, it can be done!  I'll get back to it."

B:  Yes, that's right.  But also, new dimensions and new possibilities   were opening up.   At that stage we lived farther up the coast in New South Wales, closer to Brisbane, and there were several amateurs in the Queensland organization who were starting to make charts of galaxies for reference in supernova hunting.  So I started working with them, using the prototype versions of their charts.  Also, Tom Cragg at Coonabarabran gave me access to the survey materials at the Anglo-Australian Observatory.  Then I could make 35mm photographs of the galaxies from the ESO and Palomar surveys.

M:  Then you went in and photographed the plate prints themselves?

B:  Yes, parts of the plates.  I used to travel up there from time to time and shoot off a day's worth of films.

M:  So, by now you are a father, have an active ministry and you are trying to discover supernovae when the sun is down.  How did you manage this juggling act?

B:  Oh well, the family was growing up.  We lived in a small country town 400 miles up the coast from Sydney, with a very nice dark sky.  All I had to do was put the telescope together on the back lawn and I could observe.  Given that the resources for comparison were improving, I was able to make my first discoveries.

M:  Tell me about your first discovery.  Did you wake all the neighbors up by yelling in the back yard?

B:  No, no, no.  The first discovery was an unofficial one.  A supernova appeared in NGC 1316, which is Fornax A.  There was a photographic search being conducted in Chile at the same time.  They took a photograph of this galaxy late November, 1980, but they didn't look at their picture.  Then they took another photo in the middle of December, and found the supernova. It was a day or so after that that I found it as an independent discovery. By the time Tom Cragg had verified it visually the announcement was out and there was no point in trying to claim I had discovered it.

M:  None-the-less it was a discovery.

B:  Well, it was as far as I was concerned.  Early in 1981 we had some long service leave for a couple of months and we went out to one of the beach locations near where we lived and that was where the first of my official discoveries was made in the 10" telescope, just beside the beach.   This telescope was easily portable.

M:  That's all pre-internet.  The world was then populated with mainframe computers.  How did you communicate the discovery to CBA?

B:  I rang Tom Cragg (chief night assistant at the Anglo-Australian Observatory) at Coonabarabran and he checked the galaxy, NGC 1532, visually, with his amateur telescope.  But he was frightened to report it to the Central Bureau because he didn't want a dud for the first time up.  It would put a blot on our record right from the start.

M:  Something we've all had nightmares about!

B:  So he waited several nights until he had some photometric observations that one of the professionals made.  Then he reported it.  He would have done it by phone because there was no e-mail system then.

M:  What, if any, kind of feedback did you get?

B:  It was announced promptly because there were complementary visual observations by Cragg, and the photometric measurements.

M:  Feedback from the rest of the astronomical community?

B:  There were spectra taken somewhere showing that it was a type II supernova and there was a plate taken with the UK Schmidt.  I would have to check back into the IAU circulars, but I don't think much other observing of it was done.

M:  How did you feel after making your first genuine discovery?

B:  I was very moved that something had happened!  But actually there were 3 bright supernovae that appeared in fifteen days.  I discovered the first one, and made a pre-discovery observation of the second one, but mistakenly I decided that it wasn't a supernova. So a Russian astronomer found it the next day.  I missed the one in the middle!  But there was another supernovae just a few days later in NGC 1316, the second supernova in that galaxy.   I had gone out  to Tom Cragg's place on Siding Spring Mountain and we found it there from his front driveway, with the 10" telescope.  The discovery was verified visually straight-away and reported to the Central Bureau in a couple of hours, through our contact with the A.A.V.S.O..

M:  It must have been very exciting after such a long wait.

B:  Oh well, it was a change having 2 discoveries, yes.  The team in Chile had also photographed NGC 1316 a number of times, but they didn't look at their photographs, so they actually had a series of photographs, using several filters, I believe, which showed this second supernova rising from 20.5, 18.0, 16.5 and magnitude 16.0 on the way up in 4 nights.  The visual discovery was made at magnitude 12.5.  It was found just before maximum light.

M:  So apparently having 2 discoveries in a relatively short amount of time whetted your appetite.

B:  Well, yes, I would have continued searching anyway, but it helped.  But I didn't find any more for 2 years following.  Then, there were 4 discoveries in 1983 and 4 in 1984.   So, by the end of 1984 I had 10 visual discoveries.  The thing that set the ball really rolling was that two of the discoveries in '83 and '84 became the prototype examples of the newly recognized type Ib supernovae, and another was later called Type 1c.   It was the supernova in M83, found quite a bit before maximum, which was studied in great detail, which broke open the old classification system.  It was also a radio object totally different from anything observed in radio beforehand.  This helped create much further research in supernova studies.  An identical supernova a year later (in NGC 991, and also a visual discovery) proved that a new class of supernova was involved.

M:  It must have been a pleasure to be part of the new supernovae classification system.

B:  Yes it was.  But the new advances not only depended on these two supernovae, They also depended on the fact that digital spectrographs were now available giving much better detail in the spectra.   Supercomputers were also coming along, which made possible the modeling of supernova atmospheres, yielding artificial spectra.  These 3 events were important in the resurgence of supernova studies among the professionals.

M:  It must have been very unusual for an amateur then to be what on what is now called the "leading edge of research".  Even today it can be difficult to find amateurs who are interested in pure science vs. taking pleasant looking pictures.

B:  Yes.  Well, there are still plenty who are simply interested in pretty pictures.  I think that there always have been a good number of amateurswho wanted to do some proper science.  And supernova work is now a natural area for amateurs to choose, especially considering how the researchers have related supernova work to the new cosmological theories.  It has quite a bit of appeal.

M:  Now you had a total of 10 supernovae by the end of 1984 ...

B:  There was 1 in 1985 and 3 in 1986.  In January, 1986, my 16" telescope came into use, as well.

M:  That's pretty good production for visual work.  I have always wondered why, during that time, you didn't have a northern hemisphere counterpart or even some competition in the southern hemisphere.

B:  There were the beginnings of it.  There were several Japanese photographic discoveries in those days.  Some northern visual discoveries started to appear later in the 1980s.  I think the problem was more that success depended on people having regular access to a dark sky site.  Most amateurs live in cities.   And of course they had to have their own reference resources.   The Thompson-Bryan charts didn't come out until 1990.  I was using the pre-publication versions of those charts, as well as all my 35mm galaxy pictures from the ESO and Palomar Survey fields.

M:  Let's talk about whether or not you have super human powers when it comes to remembering star fields.  In Oliver Sachs' book, "The Anthropologist on Mars", he said that you were a savant, being someone who has an extraordinary ability way beyond other people to remember patterns.

B:  The idea of a savant is not a measurable quantity, so it has to be a speculative classification based on hearsay, guesses and anecdotes.

M:  No modesty is allowed.

B:  (laughing) It's true that such classifications are based on anecdotes and not based on measurement.  I can remember star patterns providing that there is some repetition.   That's what happened with the galaxies.  If you look at a galaxy field, say 50 times within a reasonable time, you've got a better chance of remembering it than if you look at it once or twice.

M:  Well, I guess that's always true.  Can I assume that we will never really get to the bottom of this?

B:  (laughs)

M:  Certainly your ability to remember star fields did not hamper you in your work.  You also must have known how to get from one galaxy to another very quickly.

B:  That is true, yes.  Another aspect of it is that many of my supernova discoveries were recognized instantaneously, because I knew the fields so well.

M:  I assume that if you have any talent remembering star patterns you can apply it to the entire sky therefore you didn't have to look at setting circles to get from one galaxy to another.

B:  No, no.  I used a straight-through finder and could locate most of the galaxies in a few seconds.

M:  I had suspected that.

B:  It was possible to observe 50 galaxies an hour when they were scattered around the sky, and 120 galaxies an hour in Virgo.

M:  Let's talk about today's telescopes.  Previously I had talked about the KAIT automated telescope, which can easily observe 1000 galaxies in a night.  Under typical conditions about how many observations would you average a night?

B:  It's not a question that can be really answered because I very seldom observed all night.  I would only observe for a few hours at a time.  I have observed all night on only a few occasions. Once back in 1984 using the 10" I observed out in the country for 10 hours, and looked at 570 galaxies.  That was an entire night near the equinox.   It was in March, so it would have included Virgo but a lot of other constellations, too.  With the experience I have now accumulated, and using a 16"  telescope, I could probably observe over 1000 galaxies in one night, perhaps a winter night (nearly twelve hours here.)   After all, 1984 was seventeen years ago.

M:  So you actually can remember the one night when you had all night to observe?

B:  Yes, that was one occasion when I used the whole night.  It was much more common for me to do quick runs for shorter periods.  There was one occasion, a winter night (dark soon after six o'clock), and the moon was going to rise at 10.  It had been cloudy for a week, and it was probable that it was going to be cloudy for another week so I only had this one night, 4 hours really.   In that time, I observed 336 galaxies, and then I found a supernova in the 337th galaxy.  After the next week of cloudy weather I found another supernova.  So in 1984 there were 2 discoveries in 8 days with no observing time in between.

M:  Have you found that at times you violate the statistics and it seems that supernova come in bunches?

B:  I have, yes.  On one hand, there have been many long periods without any supernovae being seen at all.  Other times, several appear at once.   Remember, in 1981, three bright supernovae were in the sky at once.  Two were 12th magnitude, and one was mag. 13.5, all found in a 15 days time period.  Imagine the chances of 3 such supernovae in the sky at any time?   There have even been a few odd occasions when three of my discoveries have still been visible with the 10" telescope on one night.

M:  Let's talk about meetings with remarkable people.  I'm here to meet a remarkable person.  How has your life with supernovae brought you to meet others?  How has it directed your life as an amateur in bringing you together with people you wouldn't have met otherwise?

B:  At the end of 1984 there were 10 visual discoveries with the 10" telescope.  In 1985 the IAU invited me to the General Assembly to give a talk.  Because the type Ib supernovae were just being realized, and were peculiar radio objects, there was a Joint Discussion about supernovae at the Assembly for a whole day.  So I was invited to present a short paper.  They paid part of my fare, and my hotel bill in New Delhi, and my paper was published in the Proceedings of the General Assembly.

M:  It must have been very exciting.

B:  I think that was the first time I met Brian Marsden.  No, I think I met him in 1983 in Boston, but he was in India as well.  I met Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge, Russian and South American professional astronomers, supernova people from all over.  Also I met Sidney Van Den Bergh, who got me into some research papers about supernovae rates.

M:  So you had the opportunity to not only meet remarkable people but also to go to remarkable places.  These are cases where your work begins to pay off, not just in the excitement of solitary discovery, but in the world of astronomy.

B:  Yes.  The 1986 discovery of the supernova in Centaurus A was one that created some note with some of the professionals.  Also 1987A, although I wasn't involved in that discovery.  There were various conferences about 1987A, and I was invited to a few of them.

M:  When were you given the opportunity to use the 40" telescope at Siding Spring Observatory?

B:  That was in 1995 through 1997.  In 1993 we moved to Coonabarabran for church work.   While I hadn't intended to use any of the professional telescopes, I wanted to see what could be done with a large telescope visually, partly in competing with the Berkeley outfit.

M:  You have to agree that competition does have its place.

B:  Hmmm.  It was a part of that, too.  In the end, the only thing I could do was apply for observing time on this (30 year old) 40" Boller & Chivens. Normally, this telescope is used almost every night for research.  It meant open competition for observing time with professional astronomers, based on the scientific merit of the project.   The allocation committee at Australian National University were generous with the observing time they gave us.  Over a two years period, we had about 110 nights on this telescope.  A lot of them were moon affected, but half the nights were fine and we made 10,000 observations and found 3 supernovae and missed a couple. We saw other ones we wouldn't have seen otherwise.

M:  How was that to jump visually from a 16" telescope to a 40" telescope?

B:  Of course it brought a lot more galaxies into the range of an observing program.  So I had to make a whole new set of pictures to have a full set of photographic resources.  Moving the telescope around the sky was the time consuming thing which meant that only a couple of hundred observations could be done in a night which was not an enormously efficient use of my time considering I had to work during the day.  I still used the 16" telescope at the same time in order to fill in the holes that couldn't be observed with the 40".  There were a couple of discoveries made with that, from the backyard, as well.  During this time, from 1983 to 1996, there were a number of visual amateur discoveries, including mine, that paved the way for astronomers to refine their knowledge of type 1a supernovae.   For example, amateur visual discoveries enabled professional astronomers to see that there are some type Ian supernovae that are sub-luminous, and others that are over-luminous.  Ways had to be devised to separate these from the normal ones.   So, these discoveries have been very important in the practice of trying to use type Ia supernovae as standard candles, to help get answers to basic questions in cosmology.

M:  Now we come to the time of the younger upstarts like myself with more complex equipment, CCD cameras etc.  Given that we are operating this way, how do you see the future?  Do you think that the automated systems lose something that you gain, or vice versa?

B:  It is possible, on the short term, for there to be so many observers with automatic equipment, all searching for supernovae, that visual amateurs will be largely out of business, so far as making discoveries is concerned..  That could happen simply by the number of observations being made.  But there are so many galaxies, and so many variable stars, that visual observers will still be able to perform a roll.  Increasing technology will certainly make competition more difficult for visual observers.  But, it is hard to see how all of the visual observers will be reduced to impotence completely.  Visual observers will always be able to poke around and just look at the pretty sights  Variable star observers, comet hunters, and supernova and nova hunters will still conduct serious searching, even in the face of overwhelming competition.  While they do all those things, there will always be the chance of finding something, however small.   After all, the chances of making a discovery visually have always been small.

M:  If I was to say, "Rev. Evans, we have funding to provide you wit heither a complete automated system to do supernovae search in the southern hemisphere, or sufficient monies to hire larger numbers of visual observers, which would you choose?"

B:  At this stage of my life I don't quite know.  It would depend on whether or not I was being paid.  My retirement project is writing history books, as you have seen.  If I had funding for an automatic system and was being paid to do it I probably might go along with it, given that I had time for my historical research.  There are one or two visual searchers in this district here who would like to get into the act as well, if there was a proper automated system.  One of the local fellows has made a couple of visual discoveries in the last few years.

M:  So you don't feel as though this is the end of an age and that visual observing as a tool for discovery is probably coming to an end?.

B:  The age has changed somewhat, certainly.  But nothing is impossible.  The thing which might create another lease of life for visual amateurs is when the funding fails for the pet projects of the  professional astronomers.  These cosmological search programs at the present time are the "flavor of the month," so there is funding for them.  But as soon as something else comes along the funding will switch and the professionals won't be searching any longer.  It may not even matter whether the job's even finished or not, or whether the cosmological issues have been solved.  If some other program comes along with more sex appeal to the funding agencies then the possibilities for amateur work will change too.

M:  It is true.  The landscape does change according to funding.

B:  It's always been a problem with professional automatic systems.  Richard Mueller had a lot of problems with funding early in the Berkeley system so he had to invent the Nemesis Hypotheses in order to get some money.

M:  I think that the time for the automated telescope is here for lots of reasons.  Humans don't have the time, staying power or the interest to observe all night every night.

B:  Yes, they can't do what the computerized telescope can do, although even that has only been very recent.

M:  Still, virtually every amateur is doing a night's work and then sitting down with their own comparison images, or downloaded pieces of the Palomar Sky Survey, or whatever.  I did this initially for the first 18 supernovae I found.  A couple of us have finally gained analysis software that reduces the next day's work.  Of course you never have next day's analysis because your identification process is virtually instantaneous.  But those who must manually check last night's images taken with an automated system are facing a task that is not humanly possible, especially for those amateurs who are not retired and have to make the time around work and family.

B:  There is a 24" telescope at the local university campus here and they've tried to rig that up for supernova search work.  It wouldn't be able to work fast, but they tried to build the telescope on the cheap and the encoders were no good.  So it's never yet worked as a supernova searcher.

M:  That's a problem.  You do get what you pay for.

B:  They will have to pay through the nose for encoders now.  Any future supernova search will probably be done as an undergraduate program, to give the students experience in observing.

M:  That comes to a point I have often considered:  What is it that makes supernova searchers different from other amateurs?  I have called them the "steppenwolves" or lone wolves of astronomy because it takes so much stick-to-it-iveness.  It is natural for human beings to want to be paid for their efforts a lot more quickly than supernova searchers are.  I would like to know what you think is special within supernova searchers such that they are able to bear up for an entire year without results yet keep trying.

B:  (chuckling) Bill Bradfield was a lone observer like that, but he looked for comets.  You somehow have to have it in you that you don't quit.

M:  You mean that when you were taking down your telescope, you were tired and you realize that you have to do other things, you never heard a voice within you that said "I quit.  I'm tired of coming up with nothing." Instead that voice said, "Next time, I'll be ready!"

B:  Yes, that just depends on who you are and what you're made of.  It depends upon what things fascinate you.   Everybody is different.  Some people can stick at things and other people can't, one person will stick at one thing and another would walk away from the same effort.

M:  Right now there are 4 amateurs in the world who are extremely active:  yourself, Tim Puckett from Georgia, myself, and Mark Armstrong out of England.  I still find that it is still a big world and that out of it there are only 4 that really wish to continue with a vengeance, so to speak.

B:  There are many others like Albert Jones in New Zealand.  He has the same qualities, although he applies them slightly differently.  He's a variable star observer.   He has twice as many observations as anyone else, and over a very long period of time.

M:  Then again variable star observing does have its constant feedback of "success".  You have your numbers and have reported them.  Discovery, I believe, is a different kind of thing.

B:  Yes, but an important aspect of my work has been negative observations. Along with the positive ones these numbers have been used for supernova rate calculations.  Now that was an unintended result, of course.  But it has worked.  It doesn't make me feel happier about negative results but it has happened anyway which is something.

M:  It is a very important thing.  The supernova rate is very important in theories of galaxy formation and in young galaxies where type II supernovae are expected to occur, the rate at any time is an essential ingredient of the evolution of that galaxy.

B:  The value of it was realized many years ago by Zwicky.  But it hasn't become possible to derive numbers with reasonable accuracy until recent times.

M:  Do you have any particular words you'd like to leave for all the would-bes and will-bes out there?  Your example has been an inspiration.  I wrote to you as soon as I had the time and you were very kind enough to answer and in detail.  I still have the letter.  By example, you are ever present.  Your 37 (33 visual) discoveries is like a baseball or cricket record.

B:  I don't think that the visual record will be surpassed for a while.  Not while the automated searches are going.  The visual record, I believe, will stand for quite some time.  However, I believe quite firmly that there should be four or five records, or even more.  There should be one record for visual discoveries.  There should be another for photographic discoveries.  Zwicky or Charles Kowal would hold that one at present.   There should also be a record for computer-assisted discoveries which were not fully automatic.  And there should be another discovery record for fully automatic searching.  This last, in turn, could be divided according to what gear was being used, because in the future the gear will be a lot better than what you have now.  The demands involved in each type of searching is seriously different.  So the records should be seen differently from each other.  I believe it is a mistake to compare your tally of discoveries with mine, or your tally of discoveries using computer-assistance with a tally made with complete automation.  The work involved in each case is very different.  How could anyone compare a discovery made by one's computer while the so-called observer was asleep with anything made by active observation of the sky?  One is a triumph of computer technology applied to astronomy, where the observer might not even need to know where any object in the sky might be found (like many professional astronomers today.).  The other is the result of direct observing of objects of known place and appearance in the sky.

M:  My own opinion is that it (the visual record) will never be surpassed because the automated search is here to stay.

B:  But it may happen one day that the automatic searches won't operate anymore for one reason or another.  Maybe computers won't work anymore for some unforeseen reason, or because they become seen as a menace to humanity, or some hacker might wreck the whole show (laughing) and the internet might become an impossibility.  Frankly, I believe that that is quite possible.  If there is a decent sized war the first thing that would be done by one country against another is to destroy its internet/communication system and to wreck as many of the other's computers as possible.  And that could quite easily affect scientific research.

M:  So your feeling is that we may pay in spades for leaning too heavily on technology?

B:  It's possible.  In any case there will be people now who will do visual work even if it is only done for fun.  It is always possible they will make a discovery.  Type II supernovae can reach maximum brightness quickly and it only has to be raining or be cloudy where the automatic system is and the discovery is then made visually.

M:  I do have real feelings for what the visual observer has that I don't.  I know that I am missing the sublime experience of actually seeing those galaxies and under all kinds of conditions and the connection you can obtain with the cosmos can be quite extraordinary when working visually.  I have consciously left that behind for this particular kind of work.

B:  Unless you did some for fun.

M:  Once you begin automation it does take much of your time in other ways. But I have seen that whenever we embrace change of virtually any kind for the sake of gain, we inevitably lose something as well.  The example I have given is when I was in business I finally got calls for my facsimile number three times in one day.  I realized that to remain with the times I had to buy a fax.  I also knew that it was a whole new world of having to have things done more quickly than ever.  Its advantages were also its disadvantages.  So there has to be something lost through automation.  The poets and light-hearted astronomers are not made and maintained by computers.

B:  Yes, indeed.

M:  It's been an interesting past.  I know that it will be a fascinating future.  And I certainly hope that however you continue your work, that you just continue your work.

B:  I will keep observing.  And in due course I expect that this local 30" telescope (at Linden Observatory) will be in use for visual observing by others if not by me.  My 16" telescope is presently on a farm out west and I hardly ever use it.  I used it in the back yard when we lived in Coonabarabran, but here, because of the layout of the place, I have to use a telescope that I can pick up, so I have a 12" here.

M:  I'd say you've made more and better use of visual observing that anyone I have ever known, except perhaps for Percival Lowell.  But he turned out to be wrong about Mars and you were right about the supernovae.

B:  (laughs)

M:  I have genuinely enjoyed finally meeting you and appreciate your willingness to share your story and ideas.

B:  You're quite welcome.  It has been a pleasure for me as well.

Those of your who wish to contract Rev. Robert Evans may e-mail him at:  "Robert Owen Evans" <bobevans@pnc.com.au>