Struve, Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von

born April 15, 1793, Altona, Den.

died Nov. 23, 1864, St. Petersburg, Russia

German-born Russian astronomer.

He left Germany for Russia in 1808 to avoid conscription in the Napoleonic armies; he subsequently joined the faculty at the University of Dorpat and became director of its observatory. The founder of the modern study of binary stars, he measured some 3,000 binaries in his survey of more than 120,000 stars. He was also among the first to measure stellar parallax. In 1835, at the request of Tsar Nicholas I, he went to Pulkovo to supervise construction of a new observatory, becoming its director in 1839. His son, Otto Struve (1819–1905), served as director of Pulkovo Observatory (1862–89); his grandson Gustav Wilhelm Ludwig Struve (1858–1920) was director of University of Kharkov observatory; Otto Struve was his great-grandson.

* * *

▪ Russian astronomer

Russian  Vasily Yakovlevich Struve  

born April 15, 1793, Altona, Den. [now in Germany]

died Nov. 23, 1864, St. Petersburg, Russia

 one of the greatest 19th-century astronomers and the first in a line of four generations of distinguished astronomers, who founded the modern study of binary (binary star) (double) stars.

      To avoid conscription by the Napoleonic armies, Struve left Germany in 1808 and went first to Denmark and then to Russia. In 1813 he became professor of astronomy and mathematics at the University of Dorpat (now Tartu, Estonia), and four years later he was appointed director of the Dorpat Observatory. In 1824 he obtained a refracting telescope with an aperture of 24 cm (9.6 inches), at that time the finest ever built, and used it in a binary-star survey of unprecedented scope. In his survey of 120,000 stars from the north celestial pole to 15° S declination, he measured 3,112 binaries, more than 75 percent of which were previously unknown. He published his findings in the catalog Stellarum Duplicium Mensurae Micrometricae (1837; “Micrometric Measurement of Double Stars”), one of the classics of binary-star astronomy.

      In 1835, at the request of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, Struve went to Pulkovo to supervise the construction of a new observatory. He became director of the Pulkovo Observatory in 1839 but continued his binary-star studies. In 1838 he measured the parallax (the apparent change of position when viewed from two widely separated points) of Vega, one of the first such measurements ever made.

* * *