Born in Seattle, Washington on November 8, 1934, Hodge grew up in the neighboring town of Snohomish.
[2][3][4] Works on the Magellanic Clouds, carried out at observatories in South Africa, Australia and Chile, included a study of young stellar associations, of which he and his students published the first catalog.
[5] With colleague Frances Woodworth Wright, he published two widely used atlases of the Magellanic Clouds.
[10] In the early years of his career he also did pioneering work on the collection of interplanetary dust from the upper atmosphere.
With his graduate student, Donald Brownlee, he was the first to use high-altitude aircraft (e. g., B52s and U2s) to collect candidate meteoritic dust particles.