Robert Owen Evans, OAM (20 February 1937 – 8 November 2022) was an Australian minister of the Uniting Church in Hazelbrook, New South Wales, and an amateur astronomer who holds the record for visual discoveries of supernovae (42).
Coming from a religious family, Evans trained to become a Methodist minister and was ordained by the New South Wales Conference in 1967.
From early 1995 to mid-1997 he also had limited access to the Siding Spring 40-inch (1.0 m) Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory (he was allocated about 110 nights, half of which were suitable for observing), resulting in about 10,000 galaxy observations, another three visual supernovae discoveries and an additional four supernovae spotted on photographs made at the observatory.
Evans also features prominently in Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything which quotes him as saying "There's something satisfying, I think, about the idea of light travelling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right bit of sky and sees it.
The bulky 16-inch (410 mm) telescope fell into disuse since his home in Hazelbrook did not accommodate a permanent installation in the back yard.