Talk:Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve

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It is hard to accept, as the article appears to, that Struve was anticipated by Bessel in the measurement of stellar parallax. Rather--I forbear from providing the footnoted dates--Struve's preliminary announcement of the parallax of alpha Lyrae inspired Bessel to come out with a better-documented (NOT more accurate) parallax for 61 Cygni some months later.

Simply put, Struve was the first to measure stellar parallax.

Most authoritative sources give Bessel credit as the first.

Some say that Thomas Henderson got his results for Alpha Centauri early, but didn't have the confidence to publish them. According to seds.org, Struve's result was less accurate than Bessel's [1]. Not surprising, since Vega is much farther away than 61 Cygni so the parallax is harder to measure to the same percentage accuracy.

Bessel was the first to publish an acceptably accurate non-preliminary result (within 10%), and for this reason he is usually given credit as the first. But most sources mention Struve and Henderson's parallel efforts in passing.

One source seems to say that Struve had a preliminary result that was surprisingly accurate, but then published a final result that was quite a bit off. [2]

-- Curps 03:34, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)