Alan Michael Dressler is an American astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science of Washington, D.C.. Among his works is the popularization Voyage To The Great Attractor: Exploring Intergalactic Space. Dressler was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, graduated from Walnut Hills High School in 1966, and received his bachelor's degree in physics in 1970 from the University of California, Berkeley and his doctorate in astronomy in 1976 from the University of California, Santa Cruz. His primary professional interests lie in cosmology, birth and evolution of galaxies, astronomical instrumentation, and extragalactic astronomy. From 1993 to 1995 Dressler chaired the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy committee "HST & Beyond: Exploration and the Search for Origins" that provided NASA with the document "A Vision for Ultraviolet-Optical-Infrared Space Astronomy". He was a member of the Nuker Team and the Morphs collaboration which studied the evolution of spiral galaxies using the Magellan Telescopes and the Hubble Space Telescope. 

March 23rd, 1948 in Cincinnati (Age 76)