There were about 10 minutes to go before the sun disappeared
from the daytime sky, but things were already feeling strange.
It wasn’t warm enough for a summer’s day in Oregon. The sky
wasn’t bright enough. It was as if the sun had been replaced by an impostor.
But Jay Pasachoff was used to it.
Dressed in a white polo shirt and the bright orange pants he
always dons on such occasions, the Williams College astronomer was in his
element. As students around him fiddled with telescopes and filters, Pasachoff
counted down the minutes to totality.
“One minute, everyone,” he announced as the first stars
emerged.
“15 seconds.”
And then the Earth went dark. The moon, covering the sun,
created a black hole in the sky surrounded by hazy wisps of the pale solar
atmosphere.
“Just gorgeous,” Pasachoff said.
Tens of millions of Americans witnessed the Great American
Eclipse on Monday, and for most of them it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
But for Pasachoff, standing in the shadow of the moon is part of the job.
Over nearly 50 years of studying the physics of the sun,
Pasachoff has become the world’s premier expert on total eclipses. As of
Monday, he has witnessed 34 of them.
During the 1 minute and 56 seconds of totality in Salem, he
and his collaborators ran more than a dozen experiments that will help them
study the dynamics of the solar atmosphere, determine its temperature and
pressure, better understand its magnetic field and learn how our planet
responds when the lights abruptly go out in the daytime.
The sun’s outer atmosphere, known as the corona, is only
visible during a total eclipse, so Pasachoff has made it his life’s work to
show up at every single one he can get to — no matter where in the world it is.
“I think we can safely say Jay has seen more total eclipses
than anyone alive today,” said Mike Kentriankis, project manager for the
American Astronomical Society’s solar eclipse task force. “That means he’s seen
more than anyone in the history of the planet.”
