Word: coronagraph
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Menzel is noted for his research in solar activitly and was the first to determine that the nuclei of planetary nebulae are white dwarf stars. His studies of solar eclipses led him to develop and install the first coronagraph in America...
...murals seems to recede. Saturn with its rings stands out almost in three dimensions, clear and cold and quiet. The waving streamers of the aurora shimmer in a delicate pastel curtain. Flamelike solar prominences erupt from the surface of the sun with more clarity than in the original coronagraph pictures. Nothing seems to stand still: the murals vibrate with energy...
...past, scientists could observe these lively goings-on for only two or three minutes a year, when the sun was in total eclipse. Not until 1930, when French Astronomer Bernard Lyot built the first coronagraph, did anyone succeed in imitating the natural event. Astronomer Lyot put a small brass disk between the lenses of a simple telescope, cutting off direct sunlight and permitting him to focus the dim radiance of the corona and solar prominences upon a sheet of photographic film. It was a simple enough trick, but one that could not be carried off without superfine lenses, free...
Newest of the college Observatory's outposts is the Solar Station at Climax, Colorado, operated, since 1940, under the joint auspices of the Observatory and the University of Colorado. Equipped with the first Lyot coronagraph in the Western Hemisphere, an instrument which enables astronomers to observe the corona of the sun without waiting for an eclipse, the Climax station is situated at an elevation of 11,520 feet above sea level, a higher altitude than that at which fliers are advised to use oxygen...
High (11,500 ft.) in the Rockies near Climax, Colo., Dr. Roberts watches the sun through the thin, clean air and through Harvard's coronagraph, with its birefringent filter. He finds the sight a perpetual three-ring circus. From the dazzling surface of the sun (well screened by his gadgets), enormous gaseous solar "prominences" leap in graceful arcs at several hundred miles per second, driven by unknown forces (see cut). Little "spicules" (big enough to be seen at least 93 million miles away) jab up and fall back in four minutes. The ghostly corona waxes and wanes...