Otto Wilhelm von Struve

His first marriage was to Emilie Dyrssen. Together, they had six children, two daughters and four sons. Emilie died in 1863.

He married his second wife, Emma Jankowsky, in the mid-1860s. Together, they had one daughter.

Two of his sons, Ludwig and Hermann, continued the family legacy and became astronomers. Of the other two, one worked for the Ministry of Finances and the other as a geologist.

Otto Wilhelm von Struve was born on May 7, 1819, in the then Russian Empire city of Dorpat (present day Tartu, Ukraine). He was the third of the eighteen children born to Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve and his wife Emilie Wall.

At the age of 15, he completed his primary education in Dorpat. While too young to attend university, he was invited to the Imperial University of Dorpat to listen in on lectures. While attending university, he assisted his father who worked at the Dorpat Observatory.

When he graduated at the age of 20 in 1839, he was appointed Assistant Director at the newly completed Pulkovo Observatory.

In 1841, he received a Masters of Astronomy from the University of St. Petersburg.

In 1841, he began his first independent research, testing William Herschel’s theory of the solar system moving toward the Hercules constellation.

In 1842, he began his research on double stars for which he would later become famous.

From 1843 –1844, he was part of the team that carried out longitude measurements between Altona, Greenwich and Pulkovo, which were based on large displacement of chronometers over the Earth surface.

In 1844, he dedicated himself to studying the sun, measuring its speed to be 7.3 km/s. While the speed measured was found to be incorrect in a study carried out in 1901, Otto Wilhelm was correct in his observation that the sun was much slower than most stars in the night sky.

In 1851, he published notes of his observations of Uranus’s moons, Ariel and Umbriel, along with findings on Neptune.

Continuing his father's work, Otto Wilhelm von Struve compiled the Pulkovo Catalogue of Stellar Coordinates, a catalogue of thousands of double stars.

In 1847, he co-discovered Uranus’s second moon, Umbriel, along with William Lassell.

In 1851, while studying a solar eclipse, he concluded that waves coming off the sun were in fact plasma, not an optical illusion. Solar corona was an unpopular idea at the time but was later proven true.

In 1852, he helped complete the triangulation of the Meridian arc from Hammerfest to Nekrasovka. This accurate measurement of distance, including the curvature of the earth, was named the Struve Geodetic Arc.

In the 1850s, he measured Saturn’s rings and helped discover its darker inner rings. The naming system he invented for the rings is still used today.