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THE ASTRONOMER Electronic Circular No 1006      1995 Oct 11 18.36UT
Ed:Guy M Hurst, 16,Westminster Close, Kempshott Rise,  Basingstoke,
Hants, RG22 4PP,England. Telephone/FAX(0256)471074 Int:+44256471074
INTERNET: GUY@TAHQ.DEMON.CO.UK             GMH at AST.STAR.RL.AC.UK
WORLD WIDE WEB                    http://www.demon.co.uk/astronomer
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GERARD DE VAUCOULEURS
It is with much regret that we relay the following news.
Harold Corwin:
Sad news arrived yesterday from Ron Buta and Frank Bash:
Gerard de Vaucouleurs, with whom I worked for nearly 30 years
on the Reference Catalogues and countless other projects, died
after a long illness.  Since the identification work and historical
digging that we are doing all started when he asked questions about
some of the identifications in RC1, he is always been in my mind
as a "godfather" to this project.
Important as his cataloguing work was, it was his pioneering
work on the Local Supercluster and on the question of large-scale
structure that is his biggest legacy.  Just as Copernicus showed
that the earth is not at the centre of the solar system, and
Shapley showed that the earth is not at the centre of the galaxy,
de Vaucouleurs showed that the earth is not at the centre of the
Local Supercluster, nor is it in any preferred location in the
universe.  With his work, the Copernican revolution was completed
and taken to it's logical conclusion.
Similarly, his work on individual galaxies has revolutionized
our ways of studying them, of understanding them, and of pointing
the way toward further fruitful studies of them in the future.
His extensions of Hubble's morphological classification have not
only made intuitive sense of the vastly different galaxy types
that we see, but have also led directly to a greatly expanded
understanding of the physical processes which actually shape the
galaxies.
Finally, his lifelong fascination with Mars has led to an
accurate coordinate system on that planet, which in turn led to
our ability to make maps of Mars to an unprecedented degree of
accuracy.  His work also led to an accurate value of the rotation
rate of Mars that was not superseded until more than 20 years of
spacecraft data had been collected and extensively analyzed.  His
value of the rotation rate turned out to be exactly the same as
the currently used value, though with somewhat larger error bars.
For me, he was a mentor.  I wish that I could claim him as
a friend, too, but our personalities were too different to allow
more than a mutual respect for each other's work.  He was utterly
devoted to Astronomy, while I have always found much outside of
the science to "distract me", as he often said.  Still, I learned
almost all the astronomy that I know from him, so his influence
will continue to be felt in our project even though he is no
longer here to have an actual hand in it.
Since I do not want to end on a gloomy note, I am pleased to
say that Ron Buta will be joining the project.  Since he too is
an active professional astronomer, as well as a teacher, a
husband, and a father, he will not have much time for it.  But he
has been active in this sort of work in the past, and I have no
doubt that he will get drawn in again.

Editor: Even a few months before his death, Gerard de Vaucouleurs
was helping TA via the Internet with the interpretation of recent
supernova results. We shall also miss him very much.

Guy M Hurst