MacDonald was a Scottish politician who served as secretary and chairman of the West of Scotland branch of the British Astronomical Association. MacDonald also served as Director of the Lunar Section of the BAA from 1937-1945, and was particularly noted for a series of ‘Studies in Lunar Statistics’ published in the BAA Journal between 1929 and 1940. In these he organized craters into four morphological classes, and established new relationships for predicting depth and rim height as a function of diameter. MacDonald died in 1973. In 1985 the IAU added him as a second honoree for the crater named  McDonald, but he actually spelled his name ‘MacDonald’.

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