Albert Jones was born in Christchurch, Canterbury, New Zealand. He was educated at Timaru Boys' High School. In the beginning of the Second World War he joined the army, but in 1942 he was classified unfit for overseas service. He has worked as a miller in a rolled-oat mill, as a grocery shop owner and in a car assembly factory.
In 1963 he became the sixth astronomer in history to make 100,000 observations of variable stars and by 2004 he made more than 500,000 observations, a milestone, which nobody else had reached before. His visual brightness estimates were very precise, reaching accuracy of less than 10 per cent. In 1946 he discovered the comet C/1946 P1 (Jones) and in 2000 he co-discovered, together with Japanese astronomer Syogo Utsunomiya the comet C/2000 W1 (Utsunomiya-Jones), becoming the oldest comet discoverer. In 1987 he co-discovered the supernova SN 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which appeared to be the brightest naked-eye supernova explosion in the last 300 years.
His work has been widely acknowledged. In 1968 he received the Merlin Silver Medal and Prize of the British Astronomical Association for his work in establishing accurate magnitudes of comets. In 1987 he was honoured with the title of Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to astronomy. One year later an asteroid was named after him. He won the Amateur Achievement Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for his variable star and comet observations in 1998. The comet C/2000 W1 discovery brought him the Edgar Wilson Award, administered by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, in 2001. In 2004 he received an honorary degree of the Doctor of Science from the Victoria University of Wellington.
