[8] De Vaucouleurs moved to Canberra, Australia in 1951, where she worked as an assistant to Richard Woolley, director of the Commonwealth Observatory at Mount Stromlo.
[2] During her time in Paris, de Vaucouleurs discovered new spectroscopic doublets and perturbations in the secondary series of the infrared spectrum of potassium.
[9] In Australia, de Vaucouleurs worked first on Greenwich-style spectrophotometric gradients in the continua of southern bright stars and of the planet Mars.
[2] She and Gérard were the first to take Harold Johnson's UBV photometric system for classifying stars according to their color and magnitude, and adapt it to the photoelectric-photometry of galaxies.
[10] In 1957, De Vaucouleurs submitted her work on Spectral Types and Luminosities of B, A and F Southern Stars to the Royal Astronomical Society in London.
[5] De Vaucouleurs was a partner in her husband's early studies of the dimensions and structure of the Large Magellanic Cloud, including the first quantitative analysis of the spectral composition of a galaxy from its spectrum.
The Second Reference Catalogue of Bright Galaxies (RC2), published by the de Vaucouleurs and Harold G. Corwin, Jr. in 1976, included 4,364 objects and considerably expanded the data provided about them.
[18] In addition, the Southern Galaxy Catalogue (1985) was completed by Harold Corwin with lesser levels of help from Antoinette and Gérard de Vaucouleurs.
[1] The University of Texas at Austin established the Antoinette de Vaucouleurs Memorial Lectureship and Medal to be awarded annually to "an outstanding astronomer in recognition of a lifetime of dedication to astronomy".