Bernard Lyot

Born on 27 February 1897 in Paris, Bernard Lyot was a French astronomer and inventor of the coronagraph, which revolutionized solar astronomy. After graduating from Paris’s École Supérieure d’Électricité in 1918, Lyot went to work in the physics department of the École Polytechnique under the eminent physicists Alfred Pérot and Charles Fabry. In 1920 he accompanied Pérot to Paris’s Meudon Observatory, where he remained for the rest of his career. An expert in optics, Lyot worked in the 1930s to perfect his coronagraph, which he invented to observe the solar corona. Until then, because of the Sun’s overpowering glare, the corona could only be observed during a solar eclipse. Lyot was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1939 and served as president of the French Astronomical Society from 1945 to 1947. Among his many awards were the 1939 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society and the 1947 Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Lyot died in 1952 after suffering a heart attack while returning from an eclipse expedition in Sudan. (Photo credit: Paris Observatory)

Date in History: 27 February 1897