W. Albert Hiltner

William Albert Hiltner (27 August 1914 – 30 September 1991) was an American astronomer, noted for his work leading up to the discovery of interstellar polarization. He was an early practitioner of precision stellar photometry, and a pioneering observer of the optical counterparts of celestial x-ray sources. Director of Yerkes Observatory for many years, while there he designed and built a rotatable telescope for polarization studies and developed photometric instrumentation. He was the acting director of the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory, then president of the Associated Universities for Research in Astronomy from 1968 until 1971, and was appointed Director of the University of Michigan Detroit Observatory in 1970, a post he held until 1982. He established MDM Observatory and led the construction of the Hiltner Telescope, which is named for him. After retiring from his professorship at University of Michigan, he joined the staff of the Carnegie Observatories to become the Project Manager for the Magellan Telescope Project, a program to build two 6.5 meter telescopes on Las Campanas in Chile. Provided by Wikipedia