[Greg Bock (Greg Bock)]

Hi Dave,
yes, good question, how does he do it?????

Peter's answer is spot on. Stu has more clear nights, and uses two observatories now, one with a 14" scope and the other is an 11" scope.
Imaging large numbers is Stu's speciality due to his higher number of clear skies than us, and he has established an efficient set up to do just that.
Also, Peter, Brendan and I don't have clear access to the entire sky from our observatories due to local house and tree issues, but Stu's observatories are located in cleared paddocks on his farm, so his sky access is also much greater than any of ours. (for example, due to house interference, I usually cant see galaxies at declinations further than -60 deg.)

However, the real headache of course is that he has so much more blinking to do, which is the really hard part. This is one reason why Stu leaves the analysis and reporting to Col, or Peter, or me. Once he finds a good suspect, he leaves that part of the process with any of us who are available to help, while he gets on with the job of imaging, or blinking, or both!


To give you a comparison, I imaged and blinked 230 galaxies 3 nights ago last Friday night before I went to bed at 12 midnight. This was a very good number for me, but a drop in the ocean compared to the numbers that Stu can image. Since January 2012, I am averaging about 600 galaxies per month ( about 3,800 to date) for imaging and blinking, Stu could do at least 5 times as many in a good month, so he has 5 times the chance of finding something.
Stu can also image all night automatically while he sleeps without worrying too much about rain, which is something we would never do in Brisbane as it is to risky to leave the roof open unattended, so that also increases his numbers.