Born Hellerup, Denmark, 27 February 1907
Died Washington, District of Columbia, USA, 31 October 2000
Danish–American astrometrist Kaj Strand pioneered the use of reflecting telescopes for the measurement of parallax and orbits of visual binaries. The United States Naval Observatory, under his direction, completed the first extensive infrared survey (2 μm) in 1969, which found about 3,000 sources.
Strand was the son of Viggo Peter and Constance (née Malmgren) Strand; he married Emilie Rashevsky on 10 June 1949, and they had two daughters, Kristin Ragna and Constance Vibeke. Strand received his BA and M.Sc. degrees from the University of Copenhagen in 1931 and his Ph.D. from the same university in 1938 for work done with Ejnar Hertzsprungwhile both were at Leiden, the Netherlands. He became a geodesist with the Royal Geodetic Institute, Copenhagen, 1931. In 1933, Strand was appointed assistant to the director of the University Observatory, Leiden, the Netherlands, where...
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Selected References
Dick, Steven J. (2001). “Kaj Aage Strand, 1907‐2000.” Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society 33: 1584–1585.
Strand, K. Aa. (1943). “61 Cygni as a Triple System.” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 55: 29–32.
——— (1943). “The Orbital Motion of 61 Cygni.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 86: 364–367.
——— (1944). “The Astrometric Study of Unseen Companions in Double Stars.” Astronomical Journal 51: 12–13. (For a more popular account see The Sky 5, no. 7 (1941): 6–8.)
——— (ed.) (1963). Basic Astronomical Data. Vol. 3 of Stars and Stellar Systems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
——— (1964). “The New 61‐inch Astrometric Reflector.” Sky & Telescope 27, no 4: 204–209, 232–233. (For a more technical account see Part 1 of the Publications of the U.S. Naval Observatory 20 [1971]. Parts 2 and 3 [1967 and 1970 respectively] of the same volume, mostly by other authors, supplement that latter account.) (Catalogs of the parallaxes measured by the instrument have appeared in subsequent volumes of the same Publications.)
——— (1977). “Hertzsprung's Contributions to the HR Digaram.” In Memory of Henry Norris Russell, edited by A. G. Davis Philip and David H. DeVorkin, pp. 55–60. Albany, New York: Dudley Observatory.
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Batten, A.H. (2007). Strand, Kaj Aage Gunnar. In: Hockey, T., et al. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_1333
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