My dad’s secretary, Winnie, an amateur scientist herself, had given me a copy of the May 1974 issue featuring Kenneth Weaver’s inspiring article “The Incredible Universe”, which featured Dr. Sandage prominently. I thought he’d be a good person to ask (!) so I wrote him a letter explaining my project and asking how the distances to distant galaxies were found. I wonder if today’s 12 year olds could imagine how thirsty for information and how isolated I was, in those days before the web.

To my delight, I received an envelope bearing the stamp of Hale Observatories and stuffed with papers, and a gracious, full page letter from Dr. Sandage, which I still have, saying, of astronomy, “It is the greatest profession in the world”. He said I should “try to get the main idea of each paper”, and quoted Churchill when he wrote, “If you find parts you can’t understand or don’t care for, just skip them.” Needless to say, my project was very successful. He also invited me to contact him if I was ever in the neighbourhood.

In April of 1977 my parents took me out of school for a month for a driving trip to California. I quickly arranged to meet Dr. Sandage at Hale Observatories.

I arrived, and was told to wait in the magnificent library, where the librarian laid out several books for me to look at (no doubt on instruction to do so). I learned that he had made a similar visit once to Yerkes, when young, to meet Otto Struve, and had been told to wait in the library. To my surprise, what I thought would be a 20 minute, potentially awkward meeting turned into a grand two hour visit with a brilliant, jolly, generous, self-effacing man.

He was unabashedly passionate about astronomy, and absolutely delighted that I felt the same way. I would describe his speaking style as “emotive” – you knew how he felt about what he was saying. He laughed about his attempt at building a 6″ telescope (like me, he didn’t quite finish the mirror) and we talked about variable stars (a shared passion). He showed me a variety of intriguing things, including what appeared to be a homemade slide viewer on his desk that he let me look through. It contained a view of the Ring Nebula. He said that astronomers once couldn’t figure out for the life of them why planetary nebula so often looked like rings, until someone figured out that they were spherical shells and we were looking through more material when we looked through the edges. He said he looked at it now and then to remind himself how easy it was to fool himself with assumptions.

The highlight was being taken into the plate vault, where he rummaged around and pulled out long paper envelope with a fragile plate. He extracted enough of it for me to view, turned on a light box, and asked me what it was. “A spectrogram of a galaxy”, I replied. “Yes!” he said enthusiastically. “That’s the spectrogram Hubble was looking at when he realized the universe is expanding.” I carefully gave it back to him and said “That must be the most valuable piece of glass in the world!” He let out a loud guffaw, then said, low and wryly, “Well, some might think so”.

He met my parents in the parking lot, made some generous comments, and left me with a copy of The Hubble Atlas of Galaxies and a personal inscription in another book, saying “Best of luck in your search for the universe that will be yours in the future”. (Yes, he used the word “for”).

I last spoke to him in 1990 when I wrote a feature about Edwin Hubble for The Globe and Mail in Canada (I asked him about the spectrogram: it was NGC 7619, and Hubble was confirming Humason’s measurements: NGC 7619 was much more distant than the other galaxies in the sample to that point, and it dramatically confirmed that the slope of the velocity vs. distance graph was linear). Unfortunately, while I did get a degree in astronomy, I was not to become a professional astronomer, but I will never forget how he made an effort to create a wonderful, life-changing experience for a hopeful kid that day on Santa Barbara Street. Rest well, Uncle Allan.

He was prolific. He had over 200 publications, some of which are the most highly cited in astronomy. His color-magnitude diagram of the globular cluster M3, published in 1953, represented a fundamental advance in our understanding of how stars evolve and was the first serious measurement of the ages of the oldest stars in our galaxy. He pioneered this kind of study of stellar populations, which is a burgeoning field in astronomy even today.

In his 1961 paper on “The Ability of the 200-inch Telescope to Discriminate Between Selected World Models,” he laid out a roadmap for making observational measurements of the geometry of the universe. This is one of the all-time classic papers in cosmology and set the agenda for work that continues today with the Hubble Space Telescope. Measuring the expansion rate (the Hubble constant) became a major focus of his later research. Much of what he did in this field was pathbreaking and fundamentally sound. He was not shy in pointing out the flaws in work with which he disagreed, which generally resulted in a heated debate that raised everyone’s game (even if it did stray into polemics from time to time). The fact that the most accurate measurements today — made by Adam Riess and collaborators in 2009 — indicate a a higher value than he preferred, should not diminish his contributions to the field.

He was a galaxy cartographer and taxonomist par excellence. His “Hubble Atlas of Galaxies” became the essential reference for anyone classifying galaxies and studying their structure. His Revised Shapley-Ames catalog was for many years one of the most important resources for studying nearby galaxies and using them as tracers of large-scale structure. He carried out some of the most extensive surveys of nearby clusters of galaxies, using giant photographic plates from the du Pont telescope in Chile.

His most cited paper is his 1962 work with Eggen and Lynden-Bell — “Evidence from the motions of old stars that the Galaxy collapsed.” This paper was among the first to use the “fossil record” of the motions of old stars in our galaxy to try to infer something fundamental about the way the galaxy formed. While the views on how this collapse took place have evolved over the years, this, like many of his other papers, set the agenda for an entire field of astrophysics.

I have heard that Allan could be a difficult person. I never really experienced that, although I did receive a few good-natured criticisms when I strayed into working on the Hubble constant later in my career. When I was working on my PhD, he was an amazing mentor. He read every draft of my thesis chapters within a day or two and wrote voluminous comments in the margins. He told me that the most important lesson he learned when he first got to Carnegie was how important it was to write well. Of course I thought I already did write well, but I learned a lot from him about how to express myself more clearly and how to focus on what was most important. I also remember several conversations lasting many hours where we would move stream-of-consciousness from some nitty-gritty aspect of my thesis to grand ideas for using some property of galaxies as a more accurate probe of the geometry of the universe or a more sensitive test that the expansion of the universe is real. For an impressionable graduate student, the idea that one should be thinking about the universe as a whole — even while focusing on some obscure corner of it — was a fundamental lesson in how to do science.

More than anyone else I have ever met, Allan Sandage lived astronomy. That may be why he took so many aspects of scientific disagreements so personally. Astronomy has lost one of the all-time greats, and many of us have lost our uncle Allan.

ELS theory of our Milky Way’s formation named for its authors, Olin Eggen, Donald Lynden-Bell & Allan Sandage

of course, my apologies.

Some Allan Sandage Quotes

Allan Sandage was interviewed by Ken Croswell which noted how he began his astronomical career as a keen amateur before moving into the profesional realm under two of the greatest astronomers of the last century, Edwin Hubble and Walter Baade :

Sandage first encountered astronomy in third grade when peering through another boy’s telescope. “I’ve known since that time ,”said Sandage, “that there was no other career.” Soon after Sandage began charting sunspots, watching meteor showers and observing the flickering of variable stars. During his junior and senior years at the university of Illinois, he participated in a nationwide star-counting program organised by Bart Bok, who had observers study the Milky Way in different constellations. As part of the project Sandage examined the constellation Perseus and counted a million stars.

- Page 120, ‘The Alchemy of the Heavens’, Ken Croswell, Oxford University Press, 1995.

Sandage on his favourite area of astronomy :

“I’m really a stellar evolutionist” said Sandage, who today is actually better known for hs work in cosmology, thestudy of the entire universe. “I’m much more interested in stellar evolution than in cosmology. Stellar evolution was the exciting thing for me. It was like the origin of the species, except this was the origin of the H-R diagram. What would we know about the Milky Way, and the formation of it, if the theory of stellar evolution or the explanation of the H-R diagram or the age dating of star clusters were not possible?”
- Page 121, ‘The Alchemy of the Heavens’, Ken Croswell, Oxford University Press, 1995.

& Croswell’s book especially covered the clash over the famous ELS theory of our Milky Way’s formation (named for its authors, Olin Eggen, Donald L,/b>ynden-Bell & Allan Sandage) which with a a later rival theory proposed by Leonard Searle and Robert Zinn.

“He [Sandage] is a very worthy adversary,” [Bruce] Carney said, “and a man of very broad knowledge.When you write a paper that’s challenging what he’s done, you know you’ve got to have it backed up by good dtata and a thorough analysis.”
- Page 143, ‘The Alchemy of the Heavens’, Ken Croswell, Oxford University Press, 1995.

&

[John Norris] “My working hypothesis is that both ELS and Searle and Zinn hold some truth … ELS were strong on the collapse, in which there should be some dependence on of kinematics [stellar galactic orbits esp. eccentricity in the halo] on ["metals"] abundance…

&

“ELS set the ball rolling” said Zinn. “Its a classic paper. … what they discovered in their data was there’s a disk and there’s a halo. They showed that through observations of stars near the Sun you could deduce something about the structure of the disk and halo.”

&

[Olin Eggen] “Just the fact that ELS is still being discussed thirty years later is something. Good God,”he said, “in this business thirty years is a lifetime.” As for Sandage he remains ELS’s strongest supporter. At the end of his 1990 paper, he listed six conclusions concerning the Galaxy’s origin and evolution, most of which reiterated ELS. In his sixth and final conclusion,though, Sandage admitted, “The only conclusion not in dispute is that the Galaxy has not always been as we see it today.”
- Pages 144-145, ‘The Alchemy of the Heavens’, Ken Croswell, Oxford University Press, 1995.

However Sandage’s model of our Milky Way’s formation fares as more information comes in, he will always be considered one of the giants of astronomy for the age – and as a great, dedicated, bloke too.

http://www.buch24.de/shopdirekt.cgi?id=4064734&p=3&t=&h=&kid=0&klid=2&sid=1

You can see parts of it here:

http://books.google.de/books?id=k5lAwbslaG8C&pg=PA397&lpg=PA397&dq=saas+fee+school+sandage+longair+kron+springer&source=bl&ots=HOElAXWSd0&sig=_C-aNfSFsQpr6r4rrDgS7pmjzUY&hl=de&ei=lQDkTLzKIsuUOpmthZIB&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

A similar review is available online:

http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Sept01/Sandage/Sand_contents.html