All my life long, I have been drawn to the beauty of the night sky. As many children, I was having fun finding the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper in the sky, I marveled at the simple contemplation of the sky.
Curious to know the mysteries of the universe since my teenage, my first contact with astronomy was the reading of Hubert Reeves’s book « Stardusts » , followed by other random readings of books that I found in the libraries to which I had access. The Voyager probes accompanied this discovery of the cosmos with their magnificent images of the great planets of the solar system.
For 36 years, from 1988 to 2024, I was involved in the development of the plateau de Bure observatory, in the Hautes Alpes, as an operator of the array of large parabolic dishes 15 meters diameter, which went from two antennas in 1988 - at the time when the radioastronomy interferometer was preparing to deliver its first scientific data - to twelve antennas in 2022.
I had daily contact with the astrophysicists who develop and allow the operation of this observatory for the community of researchers, in order to carry out astronomical observations.
This observatory is now called NOEMA (NOrthern Extended Millimeter Array). It operates in the particular field of millimetric radioastronomy : it allows to study the very cold elements of the universe, the molecules that surround stars and galaxies. Since the 1990s, it has been one of the flagships of millimetric radioastronomy worldwide, one of the most prestigious sites for deep sky observation.
I received the accreditation "animateur Petite Ourse AFA" after a dedicated training, at the Observatory of the Baronnies Provençales.
(AFA : Association Française d'Astronomie)
Today, I am pleased to share with you my wonder, from a simple contemplation of the beauty of the night sky and its celestial bodies to that given to us by the vision and understanding allowed by the the scientific results of the great instruments available to the astronomical community.
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