Laird Award - Bob Sandy

The 2015 David E. Laird Award goes to Robert "Bob" Sandy of the US

"for His Pioneering and Tireless Efforts in Measuring, Reducing,

and Analyzing Total and Grazing Lunar Occultations, Organizing and

Leading Graze Teams, Double Star Discoveries, and Creating Countless

Original Lunar Limb Profiles."

Bob is one of the "pioneers" of Total Lunar and grazing occultations decades prior to recording occultations on video. He was IOTA before IOTA was IOTA. He not only organized 151 graze teams over the years, but he spent countless hours hand drawing observed lunar grazing occultation pictorial reductions. He also dedicated a lot of his time doing manual lunar limb correction lookups using the Watts lunar limb correction charts (a team effort of “profile-plotters”), manually digitizing the Watts atlas, and mailing pre-expedition profiles to expedition leaders. He has done between 3400 and 3500 Lunar observations since 1960 of 1500 Zodiacal Catalog stars and 588 non-Z.C. stars with his first one that showed up in the archive, ZC308, with an O-C of -0.06 arc-seconds. Pretty good! If you ask him to record a specific Lunar occultation or if there's a good lunar occultation happening and it's clear, he's your man even after almost 55 years. He has also been involved with at least 1 double star discovery published in the JDSO.

- Comments by Tom Campbell, Hal Povenmire, Steve Messner, Richard Nugent and Scotty Degenhardt