Astronomy lost one of its most luminous stars on Saturday with the death of Allan Sandage, protégé of Edwin Hubble, and one of the greatest observers of all time.
From Dennis Overbye’s obituary in the Times:
Over more than six decades, Dr. Sandage was like one of those giant galaxies that sit at the center of a cluster of galaxies, dominating cosmic weather. He wrote more than 500 papers, ranging across the cosmos, covering the evolution and behavior of stars, the birth of the Milky Way galaxy, the age of the universe and the discovery of the first quasar, not to mention the Hubble constant, a famously contested number that measures the rate of expansion of the universe. Dr. Sandage pursued the number with his longtime collaborator, Gustav Tammann of the University of Basel in Switzerland.
Do read the whole thing, here.