Bernard Lyot

An avid reader of the works of Camille Flammarion, he became a member of the Société Astronomique de France in 1915 and made his first observations using the society's telescope on rue Serpente in Paris.

From graduation in 1918 until 1929, he worked as a demonstrator at the École Polytechnique and studied engineering, physics, and chemistry at the University of Paris.

Throughout the 1930s, he labored to perfect the coronagraph, which he invented to observe the corona without having to wait for a solar eclipse.

It was an exceptionally good site, free of both air pollution and light pollution but it came with a disadvantage: In the interwar period access to the peak implied mountaineering skills and physical fitness, especially in winter when access was only gained with a long and tiresome ski touring trek on sealskin-fitted skis, a technique mastered by Lyot, a keen sportsman and mountaineer.

[4] He suffered a heart attack while returning from an eclipse expedition in Sudan and died on 2 April 1952, at the age of 55.