Jay Pasachoff

Jay Myron Pasachoff (born 1943) is an American astronomer. Pasachoff is Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy at Williams College and the author of textbooks and tradebooks in astronomy, physics, mathematics, and other sciences.

After the Bronx High School of Science, Pasachoff studied at Harvard, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1963, his master's degree in 1965, and his doctorate in 1969. He worked at the Harvard College Observatory and Caltech before going to Williams College in 1972. His sabbaticals and other leaves have been at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy, the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and most recently at Caltech in Pasadena, California. He has taken a leading role in the science and history of transits of Mercury and Venus, as an analogue to exoplanet studies, leading up to the transit of Venus and the 2015 transit of Mercury.

Pasachoff observes with a wide variety of ground-based telescopes and spacecraft, and reports on those activities in writing his texts. Pasachoff has carried out extensive scientific work at total solar eclipses, and has championed the continued contemporary scientific value of solar eclipse research. His research has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the National Geographic Society. He is Chair of the Working Group on Eclipses of the International Astronomical Union of the Sun and Heliosphere Division and of the Education, Outreach, and Heritage Division. His solar work also includes studies of the solar chromosphere, backed by NASA grants, using NASA spacecraft and the 1-m Swedish Solar Telescope on La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain. He has collaborated with a professor of art history, Roberta J. M. Olson of the New-York Historical Society, on astronomical images in the art of Renaissance Italy, Great Britain, the U.S. (eclipse oil paintings), and elsewhere.

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