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What wasn't touched on in the piece, was that most of his discoveries were made in the era before automated CCD sky surveys really took off. These days the vast majority of supernovae are discovered that way and generally earlier, and Bob's contribution is one more example of an available field of amateur science that isn't the frontier it once was.
Neverthless I think Bob put in hundreds of hours of visual searching to bag each discovery, often surveying 1000 galaxies a night having memorised the location of 10's of 1000's of field stars. It is certainly an icredible human feat reminiscent of the tenacity of great amateur astronomers such as John and William Herschel.
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