The Universe as seen through a T350 F4.6 ONTC Telescope

Who am I?

I grew up in the countryside in a mountainous region of France called Haute-Savoie. When I was about 9, me and my family were walking back one moonless night from my uncle’s a block away when I looked up…

I was flabbergasted, it was so beautiful. Those millions of stars all shining down on me. It was at this precise moment that I fell in love with the night sky. From this point on, the night was my friend and the sky a lifelong companion.  I would first use a cardboard skymap to learn the name of stars and constellations, then got my first 50mm refractor. I then had a 60 mm refractor before moving on to a 115mm F/D9 Newtonian telescope when I was 14. One night, I “rediscovered” Saturn as I noticed that bright star on the Eastern horizon which did not feature on my skymap. I pointed the scope that way and as I focused it, the blur I was looking at turned into an oval and finally into rings. At 17, I had ground a 260 mm parabolic mirror and built my first telscope. By 25, I wanted a large scope I could move about to get away from light pollution and bought a C11 on a G11 mount. I  took a few hand and eye guided photographs on Ektar 1000 film (this was back in the 90’s), and so started my “astrophotographer career”! Since then, technology has moved on, and Amateurs can now acquire images that would have been fit to be published in astronomy books back then…  Let’s see what the future brings. contact