Hugh Ernest Butler

Hugh Ernest Butler FRSE MRIA FRAS (27 December 1916 – 10 May 1978) was a pioneering Welsh-born astronomer. Wartime work included important contributions to anti-aircraft gunnery followed in peacetime by major contributions to galactic and extragalactic research particularly via ballistic rockets. He promoted the idea of an orbiting space telescope as early as 1958.

He was born on 27 December 1916 in Llandaff in Glamorganshire in Wales.

He was educated firstly at Cardiff High School and then at Whitgift School in Croydon before being awarded a place at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, winning a scholarship to read Mathematics.

In 1940 he received an Isaac Newton Studentship and commenced work on a PhD but the telescope on which he was working was dismantled as a result of the war and the academic work had to be put on hold. In the same year he was asked to join Prof Patrick Blackett to do operational research in anti-aircraft guns in Richmond, in relation to defending the country during the Second World War. He spent much of the war at various anti-aircraft installations around the country and while not engaged in work he was spending what time he could seeing one Gwendoline Harrison, a scholarship student who he had met at Cambridge when she was evacuated from London.

In 1946 he returned to Cambridge to be based at the Cambridge Observatory as Senior Observer and was able to complete the observational work on his PhD In 1947 he transferred to Dunsink Observatory, part of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in Ireland, where he stayed until 1953.

At Dunsink he produced a number of papers concerning the photoelectric recording of stellar occultations and stellar scintillation , topics that led ultimately to the technologies that support the discovery of exoplanets and the construction of large ground-based optical telescopes respectively. He was also intensely practical and gained a significant reputation for the design and implementation of novel instruments. At Dunsink these skills were put to good effect in building it up as a modern observatory. He also took part in the commissioning of the Armagh-Dunsink-Harvard (ADH) Schmidt telescope at Bloemfontein, South Africa which produced much valuable early material for galactic and extragalactic research.

In 1953 he moved to Edinburgh Observatory where he continued for the rest of his life in the role of senior astronomer.

There he set up a large Hewitt-Schmidt Camera as an outpost observatory near Peebles. The 'Hewitt' was specifically designed for the observation and tracking of satellites and in October 1957 he and Dr. Vincent Reddish were jointly two of the first astronomers in the UK to observe the track of the Sputnik 1 satellite .