Born in Iowa, Dr. Sandage was Staff Astronomer Emeritus with the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and a senior research scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute. His research involved stellar evolution, galaxies, the extragalactic distance scale, the value of the Hubble Constant, the deceleration parameter, and the age of the Universe. Early in his career, he joined the Hale Observatories, initially as an assistant to Edwin Hubble. Using the Hale 5-metre telescope at Palomar Observatory, Sandage continued and expanded upon Hubble's pioneering cosmological observations on a large number of fronts. His lifetime contribution to extragalactic observational astronomy and cosmology, and his influence on his colleagues, is unmatched by any other astronomer during the past half century. He received the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1971, and in 2001 he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. He was elected an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada on 1975-01-25.

Deceased 2010 November 13.