Jay Myron Pasachoff (July 1, 1943 – November 20, 2022) was an American astronomer. Pasachoff was Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy at Williams College and the author of textbooks and tradebooks in astronomy, physics, mathematics, and other sciences. Biography 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. His doctoral thesis was titled Fine Structure in the Solar Chromosphere. 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 Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Caltech in Pasadena, California, and most recently at the Carnegie Observatories, also in Pasadena. 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 2016 and 2019 transits of Mercury. Jay Pasachoff on solar eclipses: "Each time is like going to the seventh game of the World Series with the score tied in the ninth inning." Pasachoff died on November 20, 2022, at the age of 79. Work Pasachoff observed with a wide variety of ground-based telescopes and spacecraft, and reported on those activities in writing his texts. Pasachoff carried out extensive scientific work at total solar eclipses, and championed the continued contemporary scientific value of solar eclipse research. His research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the National Geographic Society. He was 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 included 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. With Richard Cohen and his sister, Nancy Pasachoff, Pasachoff wrote in 1970 an article for Nature discussing that the belief in the supernatural such as horoscopes impede the growth of science. He 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