In January 2010, Watson was made a member of the Order of Australia for service to astronomy, particularly the promotion and popularisation of space science through public outreach.

Watson was born in 1944 near Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire in England, where he attended Belle Vue Boys' School.

[Note 1] Watson confesses developing "an early love of music", which he used to help pay for his studies by playing the guitar in folk clubs,[2] and which he now applies in his work with Science Outreach.

In 2018, Watson was appointed as Australia's first Astronomer at Large, within the Australian Commonwealth Government Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources.

Watson's background is in observational astronomy, photonics, spectroscopy and instrumentation with research interests in large-scale spectroscopic surveys and the history of science.

Watson was the project manager for the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE), measuring the radial velocities and metallicities of up to 1 million stars in the Milky Way Galaxy and was active in developing instrumentation for this project by developing robotic wide-field fibre-optics systems for the 1.2 m UK Schmidt Telescope and the 4.2 m William Herschel Telescope.

The countries taking part in RAVE were Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovenia, the UK and the US.

TV highlights include the "retrial" of Galileo on Compass (ABC 1, 2010), and a much-publicised 60 Minutes segment on the Large Hadron Collider (Nine Network, 2012).

This podcast has over 1 million downloads each year and covers all things related to space – news, travel, discoveries, mysteries and more.

About half are specialist technical and research papers, and the remainder popular-level articles (including the regular 'Space' column in Australian Geographic since 2005).