https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/science/eclipse-chasers-jay-pasachoff.html

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Jay Pasachoff looks outside an airplane window.
The astronomer Jay Pasachoff observing a solar eclipse from a DC-9
over the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii in 1981.Credit...Roger Ressmeyer/
CORBIS/VCG, via Getty Images

Out There

A Lifetime Under the Moon's Shadow

The late Jay Pasachoff inspired generations of students to become
astronomers by dragging them to the ends of the Earth for a few
precarious moments of ecstasy.

The astronomer Jay Pasachoff observing a solar eclipse from a DC-9
over the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii in 1981.Credit...Roger Ressmeyer/
CORBIS/VCG, via Getty Images

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Dennis Overbye

By Dennis Overbye

This article is part of The Times's coverage of the April 8 eclipse,
the last time a total solar eclipse will be visible in most of North
America for 20 years.

  * April 2, 2024

A total solar eclipse, when the cosmos clicks into place with the
worlds aligned like cue balls, may be one of the most profoundly
visceral experiences you can have without ingesting anything illegal.

Some people scream, some cry. Eight times, I've been through this
cycle of light, darkness, death and rebirth, feeling the light melt
and seeing the sun's corona spread its pale feathery wings across the
sky. And it never gets old. As you read this article, I will be
getting ready to go to Dallas, along with family and old friends, to
see my ninth eclipse.

One old friend won't be there: Jay M. Pasachoff, who was a longtime
astronomy professor at Williams College. I've stood in the shadow of
the moon with him three times: on the island of Java in Indonesia, in
Oregon and on a tiny island off Turkey.

I was looking forward to seeing him again next week. But Jay died in
late 2022, ending a half-century career as the pushy cosmic
evangelist, as responsible as anyone for the sensational circus of
science, wonder and tourism that solar eclipses have become.

"We are umbraphiles," Dr. Pasachoff wrote in The New York Times in
2010. "Having once stood in the umbra, the Moon's shadow, during a
solar eclipse, we are driven to do so again and again, whenever the
Moon moves between the Earth and the Sun."

As an eclipse came around, Jay could be found wearing his lucky
orange pants and heading expeditions of colleagues, students (many of
whom became professional astronomers and eclipse chasers themselves),
tourists and friends to corners of every continent. Many who joined
his outings were introduced to the adrenaline-filled chase of a few
minutes or seconds of magic while hoping it didn't rain. He was the
one who knew everybody and pulled strings to get his students tickets
to the remotest parts of the world, often to jobs operating cameras
and other instruments, and inducting them into the scientific
enterprise.

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