Robert Evans (astronomer)

Robert Owen Evans, OAM (20 February 1937 – 8 November 2022) was an Australian minister of the Uniting Church in Hazelbrook, New South Wales, and an amateur astronomer who holds the record for visual discoveries of supernovae (42).

Evans was born on 20 February 1937 in Sydney, Australia.

He graduated from the University of Sydney, majoring in philosophy and modern history.

Evans took up supernova hunting around 1955, but his first adequate instrument, a 10-inch (25 cm) Newtonian telescope was assembled only about 1968.

Coming from a religious family, Evans trained to become a Methodist minister and was ordained by the New South Wales Conference in 1967.

He made his first official supernova discovery in 1981 and found nine more before using larger telescopes.

While living in Coonabarabran, New South Wales he used his own 16 inch (40 cm) telescope.

Supernova 1983N, spotted by Evans in 1983 in the galaxy M83 long before it reached its peak, turned out to be the first discovery of a new type of supernova, later named Type 1b.

Only in the 1990s did automated telescopes come into use which offered a comparable speed – like the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope.

Evans also features prominently in Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything which quotes him as saying "There's something satisfying, I think, about the idea of light travelling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right bit of sky and sees it. It just seems right that an event of that magnitude should be witnessed."

From early 1995 to mid-1997 he also had limited access to the Siding Spring 40 in Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory (he was allocated about 110 nights, half of which were suitable for observing), resulting in about 10,000 galaxy observations, another three visual supernovae discoveries and an additional four supernovae spotted on photographs made at the observatory.

He served as a circuit minister until his retirement in 1998.

He wrote a number of books on the history of evangelism.

By 2001, he had made 33 visual discoveries and by the end of 2005, despite the increasing competition from automated telescopes, the total number had already increased to 40 visual supernova discoveries plus one comet.

In 2005, Evans relied almost exclusively on his 31 cm Dobsonian.

He reported 6,814 galaxy observations in a period of 107 hours and 30 minutes, spread out over 77 nights.

During that time, he found four supernovae; three had already been discovered by others, the fourth was SN 2005df, which was Evans' third supernova discovery in NGC 1559 (after SN 1984J and SN 1986L) and his 40th visual discovery.

In an interview, Evans reported that he was able "to observe 50 galaxies an hour when they were scattered around the sky, and 120 galaxies an hour in Virgo".

In 2005, Evans resigned from being the chairman of the AAVSO Supernovae Search Committee after serving in that position for two decades.

Evans lived in Hazelbrook, Australia where he wrote books.

Meanwhile, he continued his supernova hunting using a 12-inch (31 cm) reflecting telescope from his back porch.

The bulky 16 in telescope fell into disuse since the place in Hazelbrook did not accommodate a permanent installation in the back yard.

Robert Evans wrote and published books on the history of evangelism in the 19th and 20th centuries under his imprint Research in Evangelical Revivals.

References: