valerie Desnoux

[Valerie Desnoux]

The outer space fascinated me as the appollo missions was ending... As a lot of amateurs, it started with a book and when I found I was able to recognize stars in the sky, this was the beginning a long journey. My first teleescope was a 114/900 and I designed a solar spectroscope and took color spectrum of it. It was in 1978.
But I give up the dream of beeing an astronomer because I had to make sure I would have a job...
As electrical engineer, I took the opportunity to spend 3 months in an observatory, writing software to process sun-earth interactions, with a solar physics astronomer. This person, Jean-Pierre Rozelot, 20 years later was key in making the Oleron-La Rochelle Pro-am school at CNRS a reality...

As I decided to keep astronomy as a hobby, I was very excited when I read a call for a training class on spectrography... at the Pic du Midi observatory. This was too cool. We used the spectro-bardin with the first CCD camera of mister Buil. Alain Klotz wrote Spec, on DOS, to process the spectra.
It was in 1992 that I decided to try to take spectra of Be Stars, upon the recommandation of Alain. Those are probably the first Be spectra taken by amateurs, and you can find them in BeSS. It was also at the Pic du Midi that I met Christian Buil.

in 1995, the observatory closed for several years for heavy buildings work. I started to transfer Spec in a more interactive software, so came Visual Spec... With the design of the spectrographs by Christian then Shelyak, the pro-am meetings, the creation of the list spectro-l, the OHP workshop, the creation of the BeSS database with François Cochard and Coralie Niener (Meudon Observatory) the spectro technic has turned from very restricted practice to a much more popular one. So it needs constant education, software improvements and web is providing a great solution for sharing knowledge and experience. It is also a great human experience, with new friends, new talents who are taking us to the next level, as for this forum...

Since last year, I live in a very nice place with a terrace, close to the Eiffel Tower. The Paris Saint-Charles observatory is now operational. I collect spectra of Be stars... And... I do work for the" big GE", at GE Healthcare, as R&D manager in Xray imaging. So no observations during the week...

I would like to thank François Teyssier to have taken the initiative of this forum, pushing the now old-fashioned ones to new communication technics, and turned quickly his idea into an real stuff...

Valerie
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Few links to see more:
http://valerie.desnoux.free.fr/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vdesnoux/

Valerie