Obituary of Wallace Sargent (1935-2012)

Wallace “Wal” Sargent passed away October 29 at the age of 77. He was the Ira S. Bowen Professor of Astronomy, Emeritus, at Caltech. He began his career at the Institute as a research fellow in Astronomy from 1959-1962. He returned as an assistant professor in 1966 and became a full professor in 1971. Sargent served as Caltech’s executive officer of astronomy from 1975 to 1981 and again from 1996 to 1997. An astrophysicist, Sargent was a principal investigator on the second Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, a photographic survey of the entire northern sky that was converted to a digital image format so that it could be analyzed via computers. This process produced a catalog of over 50 million galaxies, and half a billion stars, including tens of thousands of quasars. Sargent was the director of Palomar Observatory from 1997 to 2000. Sargent is known for his analysis of quasar absorption lines, and surveys of active galactic nuclei and remote clusters and superclusters of galaxies. He determined the relative abundances of several elements in the early universe. For his work, Sargent was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977, and a fellow of the Royal Society in 1981. He received the Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1994, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005, and was the Henry Norris Russell Lecturer of the American Astronomical Society in 2001.