Historical pictures (1875-1975) of astronomical instruments at Paris, Meudon, Pic du Midi, and Saint Véran Observatories

This dataset of historical pictures and photographs was gathered by the author during his career from many sources, such as observatory archives, articles, scientific reviews or annals. It concerns the instrumental history of some telescopes and spectrographs, in particular those dedicated to solar physics (as this is the speciality of the author). Some images were extracted from old astronomical collections or periodic journals (such as annals of Meudon Observatory digitized by Gallica/BNF). The archive contains also a few movies. Several papers of the author about the history of instruments (such as Meudon spectroheliograph, heliographs, Pic du Midi Turret Dome and flare spectrographs, Saint Véran coronagraph) are included in the deposit. All pictures are for non commercial use only; for most of them, the author could not be identified and are now in the public domain; however, a credit must be given to the observatories.