A total solar eclipse, when the Universe clicks into place with the worlds aligned like balls, can be one of the most visceral experiences you can have without ingesting anything illegal.
Some scream, some cry. Eight times, I have passed through this cycle of light, darkness, death and rebirth, feeling the light melt and seeing the crown of the sun spread its pale feathery wings across the sky. And it never gets old. As you read this article, I will be preparing to go to Dallas, along with family and old friends, to see my ninth eclipse.
An old friend won’t be there: Jay M. Pasachoff, a longtime professor of astronomy at Williams College. I have 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 the coast of 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 secular evangelist, as responsible as anyone for the sensational circus of science, wonder and tourism that solar eclipses have become.
“We are obraphiles,” wrote Dr. Pasachoff in the New York Times in 2010. “Having once stood in the umbra, the shadow of the Moon, during a solar eclipse, we are led to do so again and again whenever the Moon moves between the Earth and the Sun.”
As an eclipse came, Jay found himself wearing his lucky orange pants and leading expeditions of colleagues, students (many of whom became professional astronomers and eclipse chasers), tourists and friends to corners of every continent. Many who took part in his outings indulged in the adrenaline-fueled pursuit of a few minutes or seconds of magic, hoping it wouldn’t rain. He was the one who knew everyone and pulled the strings to get his students tickets to the most remote parts of the world, often for jobs operating cameras and other instruments, and introducing them to the scientific enterprise.
“Jay is probably responsible for inspiring more undergraduates to pursue careers in astronomy than anyone else ever,” said Stuart Vogel, a retired radio astronomer at the University of Maryland.
His death ended a remarkable streak of success in the pursuit of darkness. He saw 75 eclipses, 36 of which were total. Overall, according to Eclipse Chaser LogDr. Pasachoff spent over an hour, 28 minutes and 36 seconds (he was a stickler for details) in the moon’s shadow.
“He was larger than life,” said Scott McIntosh, deputy director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who said one of Dr. Pasachoff about the eclipse was hanging on the wall of his office in Boulder, Colo.
As the world prepares for the last total eclipse to hit the lower 48 states in the next 20 years, it seems strange not to have him on stage. And I’m not the only one who misses it.
“He was probably the single most influential figure in my professional life, and I feel his absence keenly,” said DanSeaton, a solar physicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder.
Dr. Pasachoff was a 16-year-old freshman at Harvard in 1959 when he saw his first eclipse, off New England in a DC-3 chartered by his mentor, Harvard professor Donald Menzel. He was hooked.
After a Ph.D. from Harvard, Dr. Pasachoff eventually joined Williams College in 1972 and immediately began recruiting eclipse hunters.
Daniel Stinebring, now professor emeritus at Oberlin College, was a freshman when he was hired for an eclipse mission off the coast of Prince Edward Island.
The day of the eclipse dawned overcast. Dr. Pasachoff, channeling his old mentor, Dr. Menzel, hired a pilot and a small plane. He sent his young student to the airport with a fancy Nikon camera and told him to photograph the eclipse while standing outside an open airplane door.
“I had this unobstructed view of the eclipse. And, you know, here I was, the only person from Williams who got to see the eclipse,” Dr. Stinebring recalled.
A year later, in 1973, young Mr. Stinebring found himself on the shores of Lake Turkana in Kenya with Dr. Pasachoff and teams from 14 other universities to await the longest eclipse of the century, about seven minutes total. The moment was life-changing, she said.
“It just made me feel like, if this is what astronomers do for a living, I’m there,” he said.
Dr. Pashakhoff, his former students said, went out of his way to inform locals not to fear the eclipse and how to watch it safely.
Dr. Pasachoff prided himself on his preparation, lining up local scientific support and other connections, equipment, lodging and other logistics years before the actual eclipse.
“Jay always had a Plan B,” said Dennis DiCicco, a longtime editor at Sky & Telescope magazine.
In 1983, Dr. Pasachoff arrived in Indonesia on an eclipse mission funded by the National Science Foundation. He discovered that the digital tape recorder on which all his data would be stored was broken.
Dr. Pashakhoff called his wife, Naomi, also a science historian at Williams College back home in Massachusetts, who has seen 48 eclipses. She tried to order a new tape recorder only to be told that the formal paperwork required to ship the device to Java would take several days. Mr. di Cicco was commissioned. Within 24 hours, he had renewed his passport, picked up the tape recorder and boarded a flight to Indonesia. Mr. di Cicco arrived just a day before the eclipse.
Dr. Pashakhoff paid for the $4,000 round trip ticket. A Lufthansa employee told Mr di Cicco it was the most expensive coach ticket he had ever seen.
Solar eclipses are now big business and need less of an evangelist, Kevin Reardon, a Williams graduate now a scientist at the National Solar Observatory and the University of Colorado Boulder, said in an interview. “Now, everyone knows eclipses are great.”
Even with powerful new solar observatories and special spacecraft tracking the sun, there is still science to be done during eclipses on the ground, such as observing the corona, which continued to excite Jay.
Dr. Pashakhov boasted that he almost never missed an eclipse and attributed the never-clouding weather to luck. He always managed to secure the best locations and Mazatlán in Mexico looked the most promising for 2024.
But he sent me an email in 2021 saying that a lung cancer had spread to his brain and offered material for an obituary.
However, he wrote: “I have not given up the idea of going to the Antarctic eclipse on December 4, for which I have three lines of inquiry.” He went and sent back eerie photos of the ghost sun on a frozen horizon, his latest foray into the dark. Even so, he continued to plan the next eclipses.
“You know, there’s one eclipse, and then the next one, and then the next one,” said Dr. Reardon. “He wanted to see every eclipse and didn’t want to think there would be a last one.”
On April 8 it will be lonely in the shade.