tory director, and she would go to McDonald Observatory with Otto for months at a time, where she would help him with his data reduction tasks by copying down numbers that Otto called out while his eye was glued to a microscope eyepiece as part of reducing spectra.³⁷

Otto, Mary, and Madame Struve (Otto's mother) formed a triumvirate. They lived together essentially the entire thirty-eight years of Otto and Mary's marriage. Both Otto's wife and mother survived him, but only by a few years.³⁸

Otto Struve's first published paper, in Russian, concerned "Aid to Russian Scientists."³⁹ In the aftermath of the Russian Civil War, many people in Russia were starving. Frost, Struve, and George van Biesbroeck served as the Committee for Relief to Russian Astronomers.⁴⁰ Packages of food and clothing were sent to Russian astronomers in many cities. The funds came from astronomers and their families all across the United States.

Struve's scientific publications begin in 1923. The previous autumn the American Astronomical Society had met at Yerkes Observatory. Struve presented a paper on the spectroscopic binary 13y Ursae Minoris, and the two-page abstract was published in Popular Astronomy. Struve's publication list grew at an average rate of twenty-two items per year, reaching a total of at least 907 items.⁴¹ This places him near the top of astronomical productivity,⁴² as measured by the total number of published items. (Thus, it is difficult to do justice to Struve's work in an article of this length.) About half of Struve's papers were what we call technical contributions. He published thirty-nine articles (and ten other items) in Popular Astronomy (1923-51), 154 in Sky and Telescope (1942-63), and eighty-three reviews of books and other astronomers' work. His popular articles kept many astronomers, both amateur and professional, abreast of the rapidly developing field of twentieth century astronomy and astrophysics.