Bernard Ferdinand Lyot (27 February 1897 in Paris - 2 April 1952 in Cairo) was a French astronomer. Throughout the 1930s, he laboured to perfect the coronagraph, which he invented to observe the corona without having to wait for a solar eclipse. In 1938, he showed a movie of the corona in action to the International Astronomical Union. In 1939, he was elected to the French Academy of Sciences. He became Chief Astronomer at the Meudon Observatory in 1943 and received the Bruce Medal in 1947. Read more