About

A militant message to introduce this page. Our bulimia for digital is not without environmental consequences. In 2025, it should represent 6% of CO₂ emissions in the world (source), the equivalent of the emissions of a country like India.

Digital technology and its connected objects will also be responsible for the destruction of our starry sky. The satellite Internet will trigger the deployment of tens of thousands of satellites in the very near future. These will be all new bright spots in the night sky. The spectacle of a celestial vault observed through binoculars devoid of any satellite will soon be a distant memory.

No website can be green. However, this one was designed to limit the IT resources required to its operation in order to reduce its environmental impact:

• The reduced weight of the pages (696 kb on average, that is to say 3 times less than the world average) (source) and loading images only on demand allows fast accessibility anywhere in the world regardless of network quality and regardless of the age of the computer or the phone.
• No database is used.
• Hosting is carried out in France in an efficient datacenter, on a very low power server and manually optimized.

The responsibility of the site also applies to personal data. They are only used to monitor visits by page and they are self-collected, self-hosted and anonymized by software that is fully compatible with GDPR and open-source (Matomo Analytics). You can exclude yourself from the counts by unchecking the option on this page.

My name is Bastien, I was born in 1982 and I am a software engineer.

I’ve always been head in the air… in every sense of the word. My interest in astronomy started when I was a child with the comet Hyakutake in 1996. Then came various astronomical gifts: a bedroom planetarium, a book on constellations…

Then the astronomical events followed and made me passionate, until the day I look for the first time in a telescope. I could see Mars who was then closest to the Earth, in 2003. I never thought that we would see so many things there: the polar caps, the seas… So I bought myself my first telescope. It was completely manual, I had to learn all the constellations by heart to hope to use it.

Also very passionate by photography, I saw astrophotography as a way to bring together my passions. I started in 2005 with the first digital SLRs and a small Chinese telescope. The first tests are magical: the nebulae appear in color, as in the photos of Hubble. I am now settled in Brittany in Finistère where the cloudy gaps allow me to observe the starry sky ;-)

Astrophotography is a real school of patience. The perfect conditions are rare. You have to face the clouds, wind, humidity, cold, fatigue, light pollution. The failures are numerous. Objects can only be photographed for 1 to 2 months per year, and only on moonless nights. When the conditions are right, you have to spend one or more nights awake, watching the equipment. Some images presented in this gallery have more than 70 hours of cumulative exposure.

Hoping that my few works will make you, like me, “head in the air”…

• 12/01/23 : The image of HESS II telescope illustrates the December front cover of German physics magazine « Sterne und Weltraum » (« Stars and space »).
• 03/01/22 : The image of HESS II telescope illustrates the March front cover of German physics magazine « Physik in unserer zeit » (« The physics of our times »).
• 10/28/21 : The image Orion 360 illustrate the book Bang!!, written by rockstar Brian May (guitarist for the band Queen) and Sir Patrick Moore.
• 08/05/21 : Report for french television TF1.
• 03/21/21 : Astrobin, image of the day.
• 11/25/20 : Acquisition of a collection of 9 prints by the Museum of French Photography.
• 09/11/20 : Astrophotographer of the year 2020 : finalist.
• 04/25/20 : Astrobin, image of the day.
• 06/18/18 : Discovery of the FoGl1 candidate planetary nebula.
  • Article published in the french journal “L’Astronomie” of March 2019, published by the Astronomical Society of France.
  • Story of the discovery.
  • Spectral analysis.
• 12/12/17 : Cover image of the 300th edition (25 years) of the scientist letter “Star formation newsletter” (Hawaii Institute of Astronomy).
• 11/19/17 : Conference for the International Photo Festival of Montier-en-Der.
• 08/15/17 : Astronomy Picture of the Day (NASA).
• 04/26/15 : French planetarium of Vaulx-en-Velin, first prize of the photo competition of the festival “Oufs d’astro”.
• 2013 - 2015 : Software engineer for camera manufacturer Atik.