While a professor of astronomy, Jay Pasachoff saw observing eclipses as his principal job. He had observed 75 of them, ranking second in the world
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskJay Pasachoff’s reaction was completely different. To him “the perfect alignment, in solemn darkness, of the celestial bodies that mean most to us” gave a primal thrill that was indescribable. As a self-styled “umbraphile”, a shadow-lover, his greatest joy was to stand in that brief darkness cast by the shadow of the Moon.
It was the corona, the outermost layer of the Sun’s atmosphere, that most interested him. His love of eclipses was partly because he could study the corona properly while the Sun’s disc was dark, noting its flares, its loops of ionised gas and the plumes from the polar regions. With the data he recorded he could try to discover why the corona, one millionth as bright as the disc, was 300 times hotter.
Besides, his shadow-loving self was hooked. He had been entranced ever since his visits as a boy to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, where over the entrance a triptych of paintings by Howard Russell Butler recorded the total eclipses of 1918, 1923 and 1925 as witnessed in America. At 15 he was building a telescope, even grinding and polishing the mirror: an achievement that helped him into Harvard the next year.
The notion of citizen science pleased him greatly. He credited it to Edmund Halley, who in 1715 had asked “the Curious” to “Observe...with all the care they can” the total eclipse over London. Taking that lead, he wrote his many textbooks, field guides and magazine articles in everyday, accessible language. In “The Cosmos”, his most comprehensive work, the maths was boxed out and could easily be avoided.
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