A David Thackeray was a South African astronomer, director of the Radcliffe Observatory from 1951 to his retirement in 1974, and the discoverer of Thackeray's Globules. He specialized in stellar spectroscopy. At a conference of the International Astronomical Union in Rome in 1952, he presented results of studies of variable stars in the Magellanic Clouds, indicating that the perceived age and size of the universe had to be doubled.
