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Hi Houghy & All,
Yep he is an absolutely phenomenal observer and has a memory anyone would envy.
I hardly know Bob, but when I and some observing friends were up at a friend's property near Mudgee earlier this year, Bob and Steve Quirk happened to call in for a yak.
We got to talking about what I'd been observing the previous night (around NGC 6752 -- some pretty obscure) and then, without batting an eyelid Bob performed a perfectly executed "information dump" on everything I'd seen -- sizes, brightness, distances from other objects, PAs, appearance etc and a few more I hadn't seen. It took me an 1/2 hour to research and grade that observing list using a P.C, a database and planetarium software -- some of it I'd never seen before. Bob rattled it off like it was the names of the grand kids.
A while later we were looking at an old survey plate from the AAO (these plates are not labelled and have no information on them) with a light-box and after a scan for a few seconds, he was able to identify the four brightest galaxies (they were all at the mag 11 level) immediately and correctly and then identify nearly all the smaller ones that surround them and supply all sorts of interesting facts on them. Incredible!
Bob as an observer is playing in a whole different league to the rest of us. His ability to memorise this stuff is, in my experience, "one-of -a-kind".
Best,
Les D
Contributing Editor AS&T
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