Robert Evans (astronomer)

Robert Owen Evans (born February 20, 1937 in Sydney ) is an Australian clergyman with the Uniting Church in Australia and an amateur astronomer. He has discovered 42 supernovae since 1981 (as of 2008) and thus holds the record for visual observations without the help of computers.

education and profession

Evans studied philosophy and history at the University of Sydney . Coming from a religious family, he trained as a pastor and was ordained in 1967. He retired in 1998. He has also written several books on religious subjects, with a particular interest in the history of the religious movements in the 19th century.

astronomy

Evans had been searching the sky since 1955, but his telescopes at the time were too small to make serious discoveries and he lacked suitable star maps for the southern hemisphere. From 1968 he worked with a 10-inch Newtonian telescope . He had almost given up hope of a discovery in the 1970s when a supernova was discovered in 1980 through visual observation in the galaxy Messier 100 (NGC 4321). Resuming his observations, he made his first unofficial discovery in 1980, a supernova in Fornax A (NGC 1316) that was made public by other astronomers before Evans could confirm his independent sighting. In early 1981 it found its first official supernova in NGC 1532 . He made a total of nine discoveries with his 10-inch telescope before switching to a 16-inch telescope and later to a more easily transportable 12-inch telescope. Two of his discoveries in 1983 and 1984 turned out to be the first representatives of the newly discovered supernova type 1b, and another supernova he discovered established type 1c. Between 1995 and 1997 he was also able to use a 40-inch telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran , where he made another three visual discoveries and four in photographs.

Between 1981 and 1996 he found an average of two supernovae per year. It can search 50 scattered galaxies in an hour or up to 120 in galaxy clusters like Virgo . Only after computers have been increasingly used since the 1990s to automatically search for supernovae has its speed been exceeded. Oliver Sacks describes Evans' extraordinary talent for memorizing 1,500 galaxies and noticing the smallest changes in a section of his book An Anthropologist on Mars . Even Bill Bryson devoted Robert Evans a chapter in his book A Short History of Nearly Everything .

Evans has received numerous awards for his work, including the Medal of the Order of Australia and the Amateur Achievement Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific . From 1985 to 2005 he served on the board of directors of the American Association of Variable Star Observers . The asteroid (3032) Evans was named after him.

He lives with his wife in Hazelbrook , New South Wales .

Works

• An Evangelical World-View Philosophy. (1993)
• An Outline History of Evangelical Revivals in the Pacific Islands and in Papua New Guinea. (Compiled and published in 1996)
• Evangelical Revivals in New Zealand. With Roy McKenzie. (1999)
• Early Evangelical Revivals in Australia. (2000)
• Evangelism and Revivals in Australia, 1880 to 1914. (First volume, 2005)
• Fire From Heaven: A Description and Analysis of the Revivals of the 'Burned-Over District' of Upstate New York, 1800-1840, and Spiritual Deceptions. (2005)
• Emilia Baeyertz - Evangelist: Her Career in Australia and Great Britain. (2007)

Web links

• official page