In 1997, a wonder happened: A second comet passed through the solar system: Hale-Bopp! I couldn't miss this second chance and mounted my father's Konika T3 AutoReflex and its 50mm lens in piggy-back on my 115/900. I made rather short exposures and I remember telling to my father: Let's try 20mn exposure, just for fun. I didn't have much hope to take a good photo but when we examined the very last picture with photo store manager, we looked at each other and he said: "I think you should continue". 

I did, but the result was not as good as I expected. I couldn't reproduce the wonderful pictures of Akira Fuji, David Malin or Thierry Legault I could see in the (still) excellent astronomy journal "Ciel & Espace". 

I abandoned this passion for a few years and in 2012, I met a colleague who was, at that time, passionate about photography. Franck and I decided to mount one if his cameras on my old 115/900 and made a first light. This picture of the Milky Way was the starting point of a long serie, and the beginning of a solid friendship. Meanwhile, we exchanged our single-lens reflex cameras for modern astrophotography cameras, and finalized our ambitious project: The Peedoodo Observatory.

Born in 1982 in Reims, France, I now live on Graz, Austria. I work as a team leader for technical sales activities in a company building test systems for the automotive industry. Convinced of the climate emergency, I dedicated my career to the energy transition, specifically in the new energy vehicles. 

Besides astronomy, I am passionate about music, scuba diving and outdoor sport. 

I always wanted to be a scientist. I may have failed by becoming only an engineer, but I kept my fascination for measurement. The way the equipment extends my senses, makes the invisible reachable, and hopefully understandable. It lends me the superpowers to "hear" a torque every microseconds, "smell" parts per billion of hydrogen, or "see" electromagnetic fields. The latter commonly known as photography.

I quickly specialized in night photo : playing with space while stretching time. Running each shoot like a little experiment, searching for knowledge. I found peace in perfecting details, immersed in the scene as a silent observer. Mostly traveling in large cities these years, there was not much else than sky scrappers looking up.

The call for the sky came later in the Austrian countryside, as described above. Our telescopes since extend my senses in seeing the unfathomably far and extremely dark. Any good science experiment answers a few old questions, and asks for a lot of new, more challenging ones. So we keep going, still learning, and happily sharing.

I work as development engineer in H2 technology and therefore "Optimize the automation of the acquisition of calibration data for the hydrogen measurement" both at work and in private. I am an all-weather bicycle enthusiast and environmentalist, as well as a neurodiversity activist.