William Rutter Dawes (19 March 1799 – 15 February 1868) was a British astronomer. Dawes was the son of William Dawes, also an astronomer, who travelled to the colony of New South Wales on the First Fleet in 1788. Dawes was a clergyman who made extensive measurements of double stars as well as observations of planets. He was a friend of William Lassell. He was nicknamed "eagle eye". He made extensive drawings of Mars during its 1864 opposition. In 1867, Richard Anthony Proctor made a map of Mars based on these drawings. He won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1855. Craters on Mars and on the Moon are named after him. An optical phenomenon, the Dawes limit, is named for him.
