Gérard Henri de Vaucouleurs (25 April 1918 – 7 October 1995)[2][3] was a French astronomer best known for his studies of galaxies.

[5] He had an early interest in amateur astronomy and received his undergraduate degree in 1939 at the Sorbonne in that city.

[6] His specialty included reanalyzing Hubble and Sandage's galaxy atlas and recomputing the distance measurements utilizing a method of averaging many different kinds of metrics such as luminosity, the diameters of ring galaxies, brightest star clusters, etc., in a method he called "spreading the risks."

De Vaucouleurs was awarded the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship by the American Astronomical Society in 1988.

He and his wife and longtime collaborator, Antoinette, together produced 400 research and technical papers, 20 books and 100 articles for laymen.