W. Albert Hiltner

Who is W. Albert Hiltner?

William Albert Hiltner 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 the 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.

Hiltner's parents were John Nicholas and Ida Lavina Hiltner. His undergrad was at the University of Toledo and his graduate studies were at the University of Michigan culminating in a doctorate in astrophysics in 1942.