He began his career in South Africa, after being born in Mossel Bay in Cape Province, and graduated from the University of Natal with a BSc in Physics and Applied Mathematics going on to gain an MSc in Astronomy and a PhD from the University of Cape Town.
It did not take long before he was a noted figure in astronomy in his country of birth. By the age of 29 he was computer systems manager and depute head of the photometer department of the South African Astronomical Observatory in Cape Town. He knew however, if he was to progress in what was an international field he had to leave the professionally isolated South Africa. So in 1975 he took up the post of deputy astronomer-in-charge of the UK Schmidt telescope on Siding Spring Mountain near Coonabaradran in New South Wales – then one of the world’s main sources of optical data on the sky of the southern hemisphere.
Thereafter he succeeded in obtaining a British visa that enabled him to take up a post at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh from where the UK Schmidt telescope operations were managed.
Inquisitive, inventive and imaginative by nature, a lover of both the sciences and the arts – particularly music and poetry – he was always pushing boundaries. As a boy he was grinding mirrors for use in his own small telescope and as a young man, not only was he a keen sky diver, he experimented with new designs for parachutes.
In the world of astronomy he was at the forefront of advances from traditional optical plate recording to infrared technology. From 1981 he ran the programme for the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKRIT) which was built by the Royal Observatory on Mauna (Mount) Kea in Hawaii. In 1987 he went to Hawaii for a three-year spell as support astronomer and there he was also able to indulge in his love of snorkelling and scuba diving.
On his return to Edinburgh Dr Hawarden led a major upgrade programme for UKRIT before becoming project scientist for the UK Astronomy Technology Centre’s Extremely Large Telescopes programme, based at the Royal Observatory, pressing for the development of the next generation of ground based telescopes.
He was a prime mover in getting an initially sceptical astronomy establishment to think seriously about a passive radiation cooling technique, one that has now been adopted for use in telescopes orbiting our planet and in the new Herschel Telescope on the Canary Island of La Palma. The technique has also been fundamental to the development of the James Webb Space Telescope (a result of a Nasa-led international collaboration), which is due to be launched from the Guiana Space Centre in 2014 as a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.
Dr Hawarden, who also published a number of academic papers on, among others subjects, the properties and evolution of galaxies, retired in 2006 to look after his much-loved second wife Frances, who has multiple sclerosis. It was with Frances, whom he met at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh where she worked as an administrator, that he raised his two children Sam and Kate from his first marriage.
In his retirement he kept up his connections with the Royal Observatory becoming a mainstay of its Meet the Astronomer programme. And in the year before his life was suddenly ended he joined the local community choir Songworks relishing in its tradition of African and other world folk music.
He is survived by his wife Frances, by his children Sam and Kate, and by his younger brother Andre.
Astrophysicist;
Born December 24 1943;
Died November 10 2009.
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