I'm curious here...

Going back to the mid-sixties, I would figure the average deep sky observer would have seen, at most, about 200 deep sky objects (the majority of the Messiers, maybe 100 of the brighter NGC objects), due primarily to limited telescope aperture and poor information resources (limited atlases, databases).

The primo 18-19th century observers were W. Herschel (at least 2500 objects), John Herschel (around 4000 objects) and Guillaume Bigourdan (6000+ objects), amongst others (Stephan, Swift, Javelle, etc.).

Nowadays most dedicated deep sky observers have access to first class telescopes, atlases, databases, etc., allowing for deep penetration into the sky. The late Lucian Kemble, as an example, recorded between 4000 and 5500 deep sky objects during his observing career, never using a telescope larger than 11" aperture. Steve Gottlieb (very likely the king of the deep sky) has evidently recorded 11000+ over the years. So the questions is... how many individual deep sky objects have you (yes, YOU!!!!) recorded over the years? I am figuring, based on the quality of the membership on this site, that some of you must have recorded some truly impressive numbers.

To get the ball rolling, as of my last observing session, June 3, 2014 (poor transparency, high humidity, generally just a really discouraging outing with only two new galaxies observed - NGC5983 and NGC6014), I have recorded 4621 objects. These have been observed over about a 30 year period, with all objects subject to a written description with field sketch included.

I'd be interested to know how you've done over the years... and even your favourite observations, most exotic object seen?