Andrew Douglass was a graduate of Trinity College, Connecticut, and assistant to William Pickering at Harvard's Arequipa Station who, in 1894, scouted several sites in Arizona for Percival Lowell's new observatory including the one that was eventually chosen in Flagstaff (see Lowell Observatory).

He subsequently served as a junior to Pickering and Lowell at Flagstaff and, to begin with, supported their views on the martian canals. However, when Lowell fell ill in 1897, Douglass took over as acting director and began experimenting with artificial planet disks. His results led him to question some of Lowell's assertions, including his claim that he had seen faint shadings and cusp caps on Venus. For this heresy, he was dismissed from his post and went on to found the Steward Observatory.