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# On a Saint Petersburg Rooftop During the Solar Eclipse of 1912
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/na-peterburgskoi-kryshe-vo-vremia-solnechnogo-zatmeniia-v-1912-godu/
- Published: 2024-11-23T10:55:51.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:32:02.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Books, Science, Saint Petersburg

On a Saint Petersburg rooftop during the solar eclipse of 1912\. Photograph by Vladimir Vasilyevich Lebedev.

In his book *Sixty Years at the Telescope*, the Pulkovo astronomer Gavriil Adrianovich Tikhov describes this eclipse thus: “On the seventeenth of April 1912 a partial solar eclipse was observed at Pulkovo. I prepared for it with the utmost care and enlisted Sergey Konstantinovich Kostinsky. He agreed to take a photograph at the moment of greatest phase with the normal astrograph. I myself obtained, with the Bredikhin astrograph, the principal lines of the chromosphere and the prominences. The success was complete, aided by perfectly clear weather. This put wings on me, and I resolved to prepare for the observation of the total eclipse of 21 August 1914\. The path of the eclipse was to cross the western provinces of European Russia.”

The path of the second solar eclipse, this time a total one, on 10 October 1912, did not, so far as I could make out from the astronomical chart, cross Russia at all. That is how we were able to establish that the photograph was taken on 17 April