This collection documents the career of Lick Observatory astronomer Stanislaus Vasilevskis, and includes his professional correspondence, International Astronomical Union documentation, notes and reports from various astronomical and astrometric conferences, subject files, materials on various research programs at Lick Observatory, lectures and teaching notes, and other research materials.

Stanislaus Vasilevskis was an astronomer and astrometrist born in 1907 in Latvia. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Riga in 1939, and migrated to the United States, where he began working at the Lick Observatory as an assistant astronomer in 1945. Under the directorship of C.D. Shane, he worked on the observatory’s proper-motion study, which was launched in 1947. In 1954, Vasilevskis was promoted to assistant astronomer and faculty member at Lick Observatory, and also began supervising the proper-motion study. As part of this project, Vasilevskis was involved in taking multiple series of thousands of photographs of the northern sky, and thereby measured the movements of more than 300,000 stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Vasilevskis was promoted to full Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics in 1966, the same year that the Lick Observatory moved its operations and administration to UC Santa Cruz. He retired from the University of California in 1974, and then served as a visiting professor at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands for a few years. Vasilevskis died in 1988 at the age of 80 in Palo Alto, California.

6.3 Linear Feet 7 boxes

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