My Cruise Through the World of Astronomy

Abstract

▪ Abstract I was born in 1914 in Amsterdam. I grew up there, filling my teenage years with activities as an amateur astronomer. I later studied at Leiden University and volunteered at Leiden Observatory. From 1938 to 1945, I was assistant at the Kapteyn Institute in Groningen, including during the war years 1940–1945, returning to Leiden in October 1945. After prolonged stays at Yerkes Observatory in 1947–1948 and 1952, and participation in Leiden's astrometric Kenya expedition in 1949–1950, I became associate professor at Yerkes Observatory in the fall of 1953. In 1957, I returned to the Kapteyn Institute and soon became involved in the creation of ESO, of which I became scientific director in 1968 and director general from 1970 to 1974. In 1975, I joined Leiden Observatory again, staying until my retirement in 1981, and since then I have enjoyed the hospitality of the Kapteyn Institute. I was president of the IAU from 1976 to 1979. From 1982 to 1989, I was chairman of the Scientific Programs Selection Committee for the European Space Agency's satellite, Hipparcos. My principal research interests have been in galactic structure and star formation, with emphasis on stellar associations. In addition to my astronomical interests, I have researched and published on Dutch village history.

Proper Motions in the Galactic Bulge: Plaut's Window

“…One of the least studied low extinction windows is the so-called Plaut's window, at (l,b)=(0 o ,-8 o ) 1 , named after Lukas Plaut, who was involved for many years in the search and study of RR Lyrae variables located in relatively unobscured regions in the Sagittarius-Scorpius section, when working in the Groningen-Palomar Variable Star Survey (Plaut 1973, Blaauw 2004). One of the many results of his work, was finding that the distance to the Galactic center was around 8.7 kpc, less than the value of 10 kpc generally assumed at that time (Oort & Plaut 1975).…”

Comparison ofHipparcosTrigonometric and Mount Wilson Spectroscopic Parallaxes for 90 Subgiants that Defined the Class in 1935

“…Concerning attempts to show that subgiants did not exist, consider a most curious paragraph in Adrian Blaauwʼs scientific autobiography written in 2004, long after the existence of subgiants had been established (Blaauw 2004). As a beginning astronomer at Leiden in the late 1930s, Adrian Blaauw had studied Gustaf Strömbergʼs papers and had concluded that "(the observational data on proper motions) Figure 1.…”