Olin Jeuck Eggen was born to Olin Eggen and Bertha Clare Jeuck in the village of
Orfordville located in
Rock County, Wisconsin. Both of his parents were of
Norwegian extraction. He graduated from the
University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1940. After serving in
World War II in the
OSS, he returned to the university and received his Ph.D. in
astrophysics in 1948. He became known as one of the best observational astronomers of his time. He is best known for a seminal 1962 paper with
Donald Lynden-Bell and
Allan Sandage which suggested for the first time that the
Milky Way Galaxy had collapsed out of a gas cloud. He pioneered the now-accepted notion of
moving groups, and introduced the idea that these may originate from dissolved
open clusters. For the 1965 book
Galactic Structure, edited by
Blaauw and
Schmidt, Eggen wrote an important chapter on moving groups of stars. He won the
Henry Norris Russell Lectureship in 1985. Over that time he held positions at
Lick Observatory (1948–1956),
Royal Greenwich Observatory (1956–1961),
California Institute of Technology,
Mt. Wilson Observatory (1961–1966),
Mount Stromlo Observatory, Australian National Observatory (1966–1977), and at
Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (1977–1998). Eggen's professional memberships and honors include the
American Astronomical Society's Russell Lectureship (1985), membership in the
Royal Astronomical Society (vice president 1961–1962), Pawsey Memorial Lectureship of the
Australian Institute of Physics, member of the
Astronomical Society of Australia (president 1971–1972), and member of the
Astronomical Society of the Pacific. After his death he was found to have been in possession of highly significant historical files and documents that had apparently gone missing for decades from the
Royal Greenwich Observatory, including the "
Neptune file". During his lifetime he had always denied having taken the papers or having them in his possession. The University of Wisconsin-Madison retains a collection of Eggen's personal papers and correspondence. This collection includes material about the large scale developments in post-war astronomy and astrophysics, especially the creation of large (4 meter) optical telescopes in the southern hemisphere. The Eggen Archives are held in the Steenbock Library at University of Wisconsin–Madison Archives. ==Olin J Eggen Scholarship==