Stéphane Guisard

A native of France, Stéphane Guisard is working for ESO in Chile since 1994 and is now the head Optics Engineer for ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). He is in charge of the optical alignment of the Paranal telescopes, as well as maintaining and improving the image quality of these telescopes and their active optics.

Besides working in a professional observatory, Guisard has also been an amateur astronomer since childhood, when he started to build his first telescopes. He enjoys taking images and time-lapse movies of the night sky in order to share the beauties of the heavens with the public. He takes advantage of the pure and dark sky of the Atacama Desert, home of the VLT, to make sharp deep-sky astrophotographs. His images have been published in many books, magazines and television programmes all over the world.

In addition, Guisard shares his passions for telescope optics, astrophotography, photography and astronomy through lectures at amateur astronomers’ meetings and in educational centres.

Guisard is also a photographer for “The World At Night” (TWAN).

To create this stunning, true-colour mosaic of the Galactic Centre region, Guisard assembled about 1200 individual images, totalling more than 200 hours of exposure time, collected over 29 nights, during his free time, while working during the day at Paranal.

“The area I have depicted in this image is an incredibly rich region of the sky, and the one I find most beautiful,” he says.

E-mail: sguisard (at) eso.org
Web: http://www.eso.org/~sguisard/