Antoinette de Vaucouleurs

Antoinette de Vaucouleurs (; November 14, 1921, Paris, France-August 29, 1987, Austin, Texas, USA) was an astronomer who worked in the Astronomy Department of the University of Texas at Austin for 25 years (1961–1986) when few women worked in the field. Gérard de Vaucouleurs, she carried out her own research in spectroscopy. Her contributions (and Gérard's) were recognized in a festschrift in 1988, entitled The World of Galaxies.

Early life and education Antoinette Piétra was born on November 14, 1921, in Paris, France. She married Gérard de Vaucouleurs on October 31, 1944.

De Vaucouleurs studied mathematics, physics, and astronomy at the Sorbonne from 1944 to 1948. a gift to the observatory from J. G. Wilson in 1925.

De Vaucouleurs moved to Canberra, Australia in 1951, where she worked as an assistant to Richard Woolley, director of the Commonwealth Observatory at Mount Stromlo. During this time, she worked on the spectrophotometry of southern bright stars and of the planet Mars.

In 1957, De Vaucouleurs submitted her work on Spectral Types and Luminosities of B, A and F Southern Stars to the Royal Astronomical Society in London. It was the first quantitative spectral and luminosity classification of the 366 stars of the Morgan-Keenan system. It was considered one of the best classifications for MK types of southern stars.

De Vaucouleurs reportedly noticed variability in the centers of some Seyfert galaxies in 1958, but was discouraged from following up on the idea by her husband. Her suspicions were later confirmed by the discoveries of others.

De Vaucouleurs was an active participant in her husband's extragalactic research. Between 1960 and 1978 she helped with the radial velocity surveys done at the McDonald Observatory using the Struve reflector.

For fifteen years, Antoinette and Gerard de Vaucouleurs compiled and systematized the Reference Catalogue of Bright Galaxies (RCBG), one of the major catalogues of galaxies to be published after 1960. It built upon the work of Harlow Shapley and Adelaide Ames in the Shapley-Ames Catalogue of Bright Galaxies and of others. The first Reference Catalogue was published in 1964. It contained 2,599 objects, double the size of the original Shapley-Ames catalogue. The Second Reference Catalogue of Bright Galaxies (RC2), published by the de Vaucouleurs and Harold G. Corwin, Jr. in 1976, included 4,364 objects and considerably expanded the data provided about them. The Third Reference Catalogue of Bright Galaxies (RC3) included 23,022 objects, from a database of 73,197 galaxies at Lyons Observatory. In addition, the Southern Galaxy Catalogue (1985) was completed by Harold Corwin with lesser levels of help from Antoinette and Gérard de Vaucouleurs. Throughout this work, de Vaucouleurs was well known for her attention to and memory for detail and her ability to discover and correct errors.

The de Vaucouleurs are also known for their pioneering work on superclusters. In 1953, on the basis of their joint work, Gerard put forth the controversial claim that the Milky Way was in fact part of a larger flattened system of galaxies since known as the Local Supercluster, They developed a supergalactic coordinate system based on the orientation of the Local Superclustor and other clusters, which has been used extensively to describe the distribution of nearby galaxies. De Vaucouleurs was active in studying galaxy redshift movement.

Publications