Erickson, William Clarence

William (Bill) Erickson was a pioneering radio astronomer with both scientific and technical expertise but his legacy is primarily in antenna design and instrumentation, particularly at frequencies below a few hundred MHz. Erickson continued research at low frequencies when the rest of the US radio astronomy community turned to higher-frequency observations in order to obtain higher-resolution data. His scientific interests included the Earth’s ionosphere, the Sun (Erickson, The radio-wave scattering properties of the solar corona. Astronomical J 139:1290–1311, 1964), and galactic objects (Erickson, What is 4C 21.53? Astronomical J 264:L13–L17, 1983).