Talk:Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve

Struve or Bessel?
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 .  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.

Question about this:  The Vega page and this page are contradictory about this. On the Vega page it says:

"The distance to Vega can be determined by measuring its parallax shift against the background stars as the Earth orbits the Sun. The first person to publish a star's parallax was Friedrich G. W. von Struve, when he announced a value of 0.125 arcseconds (0.125″) for Vega. Friedrich Bessel was skeptical about Struve's data, and, when Bessel published a parallax of 0.314″ for the star system 61 Cygni, Struve revised his value for Vega's parallax to nearly double the original estimate. This change cast further doubt on Struve's data. Thus most astronomers at the time, including Struve, credited Bessel with the first published parallax result. However, Struve's initial result was actually close to the currently accepted value of 0.129″, as determined by the Hipparcos astrometry satellite."

Is this discrepancy real, because historians of science really do not know. Or is there an answer? Either way, this page should probably say so. If anyone out there knows, especially if you have a nice reference, it would be a small edit to make this clear. It is a really interesting story! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jwkeohane (talk • contribs) 17:43, 4 March 2021 (UTC)


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

Nationality of Struve
While Struve lived and worked long time in Tartu/Dorpat and Pulkovo, his nationality is definitely ethnic german. In the factbox of the article his nationality is claimed to baltic german, but that is incorrect. Most probably the cited author did not made the difference or just described Struve's scientific work together real baltic german (i.e. originating from Estonian-Latvian-Lithuanian region) researchers. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tonisee (talk • contribs) 12:24, 17 July 2014 (UTC)