Ewen Adair Whitaker (22 June 1922 – 11 October 2016) was a British-born astronomer known for his work in selenography and lunar cartography.

He co-authored multiple moon atlases, and helped NASA to select a landing site for Apollo 12 and several Surveyor and Ranger missions.

[2] During World War II, Whitaker worked at Siemens Brothers as a laboratory assistant, conducting quality control for the lead sheathing of cables used in the secret Operation PLUTO (Pipeline Under The Ocean), which supplied fuel to Allied forces in France under the English Channel.

[1] After he graduated with a certificate in mechanical engineering from Woolwich Polytechnic, his only formal academic qualification, Whitaker joined the Royal Greenwich Observatory in 1949.

"[1] In 1955, Whitaker attended an International Astronomical Union meeting in Dublin where he met Gerard Kuiper.

[1] He joined Kuiper's Lunar Project at Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin on October 5, 1957—coincidentally a day after Sputnik 1 was launched by the USSR.

[7] In 1960, Whitaker moved with Kuiper to the University of Arizona, where they established the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL).

[8] By studying images from Surveyor 3 and comparing them with photographs of thousands of similar craters under the microscope, he identified two rocks near the spacecraft.

[1][5] Whitaker also calculated the orbital eccentricity and inclination of Miranda, Uranus's fifth satellite,[1] made possible by a simple plate-measuring method that he devised and which gave a tenfold increase in precision (from plates taken decades earlier).

[4][3] Long after his retirement, made contributions to the history of the telescope, constructing an instrument built to a 16th-century design attributed to Leonard Digges capable of producing magnified wide-field images.