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Not to be confused with his grandfather Otto Wilhelm von Struve (1819 – 1905)---- Otto Struve (August 12 1897 – April 6 1963 *) was a Russian-American astronomer. In Russian, his name is sometimes given as Otto Lyudvigovich Struve (Отто Людвигович Струве); however, he spent most of his life and his entire scientific career in the United States. He was the son of Gustav Wilhelm Ludwig Struve, grandson of Otto Wilhelm von Struve and great-grandson of Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve, who were Russian astronomers of ethnic German origin. He was also the nephew of Karl Hermann Struve. He interrupted his studies to enlist for World War I, and then during the Russian Civil War he fought on the side of the White Russian forces and was wounded. When it was clear that the Whites were losing the civil war, he retreated with them into exile, his father Ludwig Struve accompanying him as far as Sevastopol, where he died in November 1920. In the year and a half Otto spent in exile in Gallipoli, Turkey and later Constantinople, he became an impoverished refugee and found work as a lumberjack. He learned that his brother Werner, also a White Russian officer, had died of tuberculosis and a younger sister had died of drowning. He wrote to his uncle Hermann Struve in Germany for assistance, but the latter had coincidentally also died a few months earlier. However, his widow asked her late husband's successor at the Berlin-Babelsberg Observatory to write to the director of Yerkes Observatory in Chicago, Edwin B. Frost, and a job offer soon resulted. Otto Struve then moved to the United States and began a prominent career in astronomy. He did his Ph.D. dissertation in 1923 and his mother Elizaveta joined him that same year in the US. He became a citizen in 1927 and eventually succeeded Frost as director of Yerkes Observatory. Eventually, he served as director of four different observatories in all, in addition to serving as editor of the Astrophysical Journal and writing numerous books, in addition to his astronomical research. He also served as president of the International Astronomical Union. In 1925, he married the singer Mary Martha Lanning. They had no children, and thus the famous Struve astronomical dynasty came to an end.
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