Bernard Lyot


Lyot, Bernard

 

Born Feb. 27, 1897, in Paris; died Apr. 2, 1952, in Cairo. French astrophysicist. Member of the Paris Academy of Sciences (1939).

Lyot began working at the Meudon Observatory near Paris in 1920. He conducted work on filming solar prominences and particularly on the observation of the solar corona when the sun is not in eclipse. In 1931 he constructed and installed a special coronagraph at a high-altitude observatory in the Pyrenees. Lyot discovered five new lines in the spectrum of the corona, whose origin as well as that of other coronal lines was established by the American astrophysicist B. Edlén in 1942.

REFERENCE

Menzel, D. H. “Bernard Lyot.” Sky and Telescope, 1952, vol. 11, no. 8.