Dr. Jay Pasachoff

As a veteran of 75 solar eclipses—including 35 total solar eclipses, 18 annular solar eclipses, 19 partial solar eclipses, and 3 others studied from afar--astronomer Jay Pasachoff is uniquely positioned to share recent scientific work related to eclipses, international coordination of observations, and future plans.

Biography
Jay Pasachoff is Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy and Director of the Hopkins Observatory at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, and a Visiting Scientist at Carnegie Observatories.  (Prior to his Williams College appointment, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech and what was then called the Hale Observatories—Mt. Wilson and Palomar.)  A veteran of 75 solar eclipses, he is Chair of the International Astronomical Union's Working Group on Solar Eclipses and a member of the American Astronomical Society's Solar Eclipse Task Force.  His recent research includes studies of the dynamics of the solar corona studied from the ground at eclipses and from spacecraft, and the temperature and structure of the corona over the solar-activity cycle from images and spectra.  He also studies the atmosphere of Pluto through observation of stellar occultations and participated in the occultation study of Arrokoth that led to the diversion of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft to image it on January 1, 2019, with the farthest-from-Earth photograph ever taken.  His current eclipse research is supported by the Solar Terrestrial Program of the Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences Division of the U.S. National Science Foundation.  His Pluto/Arrokoth research has been supported by NASA.
   Pasachoff received the 2003 Education Prize of the American Astronomical Society, the 2012 Janssen Prize of the Société Astronomique de France, the 2015 Richtmyer Lecture Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers, and the 2019 Klumpke-Roberts Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.