Struve, Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von

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.