David Stanley Evans (28 January 1916 – 14 November 2004) was a British astronomer, noted for his use of lunar occultations to measure stellar angular diameters during the 1950s.
This was later found to be an observational artifact, but the feasibility of measuring stellar diameters using lunar occultations, was soundly established.
Their technique led Evans to look afresh at his occultation research and, for the next two decades he and his co-workers calculated the angular diameters of late-type stars.
He also wrote "Herschel at the Cape,” and participated in measurements of the occultation of Beta Scorpii by Jupiter in 1972 and the apparent gravitational displacement of stars visually close to the Sun during a solar eclipse in 1973.
Evans and his fellow researchers studied late-type stars showing large starspots, and those subject to flares.
This relation extended to stars which lay away from the ecliptic and could not be occulted by the Moon, as well as to Cepheid variables, yielding their distances.