Pasachoff Receives Grant for Expedition to View Total Solar Eclipse| 01:05PM / Monday, May 09, 2016 | |
 A 2013 total eclipse provided by Williams College professor Jay Pasachoff's website. |
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Williams College professor Jay Pasachoff has received a grant of $25,000 from the National Geographic Society for his expedition to view the total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017.
This eclipse will be the first with a path of totality to cover the continental United States from coast to coast since 1918, 99 years ago. The grant comes from the Society's Committee for Research and Exploration.
The Williams College Eclipse Expedition will observe from Salem, Ore., from the campus of Willamette University. Drs. Jay and Naomi Pasachoff reconnoitered there for the minus-second anniversary of the eclipse, and worked together with the university's president, an astronomer, and his staff to locate the observing sites on campus.
Pasachoff, his students and alumni from Williams College, and professional colleagues will be studying the solar corona, the Sun's outer atmospheric layer, at the eclipse. Many Williams College students beginning even before Pasachoff's arrival in Williamstown in 1972 have participated in eclipse expeditions, and Pasachoff intends to include many current undergraduates in the expedition, including those taking his solar-physics seminar in spring 2017. His research will also include the effect of the eclipse's cooling of the Earth's atmosphere in collaboration with Professor Marcos Peñaloza-Murillo, a Fulbright-sponsored visitor at Williams two years ago.
Pasachoff has received 18 previous grants from the Committee for Research and Exploration. The 2017 total solar eclipse will be the 66th solar eclipse that Pasachoff has viewed, with images and other information about many of them at http://totalsolareclipse.org. Pasachoff, Chair of the International Astronomical Union's Working Group on Eclipses, also supervises the website at http://eclipses.info that has links to maps, cloudiness statistics, safety information, and many other articles relevant to eclipse observing.
On the Williams College campus on Monday, May 9, Dr. Steven Souza of the Astronomy Department will supervise observing of the transit of Mercury across the face of the sun that will take about seven hours on that day. Pasachoff and colleagues will be observing from the Big Bear Solar Observatory in California, with alumnus Kevin Reardon '92 of the National Solar Observatory and colleagues observing from the Sacramento Peak Observatory in New Mexico. Pasachoff is currently on sabbatical leave at the California Institute of Technology.
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