Is it worth losing sleep over?

George Alcock's many comet and novae discoveries are well known and inspiring achievements, unlikely to ever be surpassed. However, the theme of my talk Is it worth losing sleep over? is not to try to make people yearn for the days before electronic cameras and space telescopes, when an amateur astronomer could go out with a pair of binoculars and pick up visual discovery after visual discovery. Rather, it is to show that even though George possessed exceptional observational skills and had an incredible capacity for learning star patterns, he also put in the time at every opportunity to be out there observing.