Jay M. Pasachoff
Jay M. Pasachoff, Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy at Williams College, teaches the astronomy survey course. He is also Director of the Hopkins Observatory there. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard and then had postdoctoral fellowships at the Harvard College Observatory and the California Institute of Technology, where he has also had recent sabbatical leaves. He has observed 72 solar eclipses. He also studies occultations of stars by Pluto and other objects in the outer Solar System. Pasachoff is Chair of the Working Group on Eclipses of the International Astronomical Union and was Chair of the American Astronomical Society’s Historical Astronomy Division. He is also co-editor of Teaching and Learning Astronomy (2005) and Innovation in Astronomy Education (2008). He received the American Astronomical Society’s Education Prize (2003); the Janssen Prize from the Société Astronomique de France (2012); the Richtmyer Memorial Lecture Award, American Association of Physics Teachers (2017); and the Klumpke-Roberts Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (2019). Asteroid (5100) Pasachoff is named after him.
Alex Filippenko
Alex Filippenko is a Professor of Astronomy, and the Richard & Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences, at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1979) and his doctorate from the California Institute of Technology (1984). His primary areas of research are exploding stars, gamma-ray bursts, active galaxies, black holes, and observational cosmology. Filippenko was the only person to have been a member of both teams that revealed the Nobel-worthy accelerating expansion of the Universe. He is one of the world’s most highly cited astronomers and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (2009). Filippenko has won many prestigious teaching awards, including the Carnegie/CASE National Professor of the Year among doctoral institutions (2006). He has appeared frequently on science newscasts and television documentaries, especially The Universe series. He received the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization (2004). He enjoys world travel and observing total solar eclipses (16, all successfully).
Author Alex Filippenko introduces the new 5th edition of 'The Cosmos'
