| Gérard de Vaucouleurs | |
|---|---|
| Born | 25 April 1918 Paris |
| Died | 7 October 1995 (aged 77) Austin, Texas |
| Nationality | France |
| Fields | astronomy |
| Alma mater | Sorbonne |
| Notable awards | Henry Norris Russell Lectureship 1988 |
Gérard Henri de Vaucouleurs (25 April 1918 – 7 October 1995) was a French astronomer.
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Born in Paris, he had an early interest in amateur astronomy and received his undergraduate degree in 1939 at the Sorbonne in that city. After military service in World War II, he resumed his pursuit of astronomy.
Fluent in English, he spent 1949–51 in England, 1951–57 in Australia, the latter at Mount Stromlo Observatory, 1957–58 at Lowell Observatory in Arizona and 1958–60 at Harvard. In 1960 he was appointed to the University of Texas at Austin, where he spent the rest of his career.
He specialized in the study of galaxies and was co-author of the Third Reference Catalogue of Bright Galaxies. His specialty included reanalyzing Hubble and Sandage's galaxy atlas and recomputing the distance measurements utilizing a method of averaging many different kinds of metrics such as luminosity, the diameters of ring galaxies, brightest star clusters, etc., in a method he called "spreading the risks." His entry into American astrophysics made a big splash, and he toured the US throughout the 1970s like a barnstormer, touting his calculation of the Hubble constant having a value of 100.
The de Vaucouleurs modified Hubble sequence is a widely used variant of the standard Hubble sequence.
De Vaucouleurs was awarded the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship by the American Astronomical Society in 1988. He was awarded the Prix Jules Janssen of the French Astronomical Society in the same year.