Yup it's a big congrats to Stu on number 4.
What Stu doesn't say is the mammoth effort and dedication (not to mention the $$$$ and his wifes support) that he regularly puts into his searching. With many hundreds of images per night, this discovery alone was the result of the evenings work of some 300 images followed by about 2-3 hours of blinking to find that elusive new object. Then, through the tiredness questioning starts, is this noise or is it real? He also works his own dairy farm with his wife during the day, so lots of physical work during the day after a nights imaging and morning blinking images sure adds up.
Then after the discovery of course comes the checking for known Minor Planets, Variable Stars etc. Getting the accurate Astrometry and Photometry and then reporting it, in some cases only to find as we did with a "discovery" last month that it was in fact a very faint variable M star. As a group the credibility now gained from involvement in some 7 discoveries and assistance on a few others has brought with it very welcome, completely unexpected assistance and we now have a professional astronomer that we are able to contact at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile who has taken several spectra using the 6 meter 'scopes based there - hows that! But this also brings a responsibility in that we will be vigilant in our reporting, checking everything many times prior to reporting to the IAU or anyone. In the case of the M star we got the spectra very quickly and were able to withdraw the notification prior to it being announced.
I now think Stuart is New Zealands leading Supernova discoverer and as I predicted he will go on to find many, many Supernova.
By the way the PGC stands for Principal Galaxy Catalogue (193,898 galaxies) the Galaxy also has an ESO (European Southern Observatory) number ESO 159-23.
Below is a useful list of some catalogues
http://www.stargazing.net/astropc/doc/ecatinfo.html
A nice little bit in Astronomy Magazine. Note the the PGC number on the galaxy image is the correct one, not the one in the text.
http://cs.astronomy.com/asycs/blogs/...ding-star.aspx
PeterM.