Quelques informations sur moi
What's new, and how to get in touch with me ?
Since March 2003, I live in San Pedro de Atacama in northern Chile. More precisely, we are located in the ayllu (oasis) de Solor, about 6km to the south of San Pedro, on the west side of the road to Toconao. in 2003, I took a leave from CNRS and together with my spouse we have opened a public observatory, which allows the general public to discover the sky and more generally astronomy. Since October 1st, 2007, we also have a lodge, which we dedicate to amateur astronomers who want to observe the austral sky. The business name is San Pedro de Atacama Celestial Exploration, or SPACE for short. The website is www.spaceobs.com as you may have guessed. This business part is the way to operate another observatory, which I called, with authorisation from Carolyn Shoemaker, the Shoemaker Observatory. I could not call it the Eugene Shoemaker Observatory, because some people used this acronym for another observatory 40 years sooner than me (ESO =European Southern Observatory), nor the Gene Shoemaker Observatory (GSO = Gemini South Observatory). For now, SO will operate small telescopes, but aims at operating larger ones soon. From there we have a wonderful view of the volcano chain, it is calm and beautiful. At night, there is a wonderful sky outside most of the time. San Pedro, while not the best astronomical site of the world is, for me, the best astronomical site of the world with still human conditions (electricity, water, internet, telephone, shops, restaurants). We have 3 hectares of land there. My wife and I live in a nice 170m2 adobe house, which seems to have been built for an astronomer.
My cellular telephone in Chile is the 09 817 8354 (or 0056 9817 8354 from abroad). We have a slow GPRS based internet in the house. Never, ever, try to call us during mornings... Knowing that Chile time is 6 hours sooner than french time in the chilean winter (french summer) or 4 hours in the chilean summer (french winter).
Our postal address is :Alain Maury - Casilla 21 - San Pedro de Atacama - Chile
We have an agency on Caracoles street (the main street in San Pedro), number 166. Since 2006 we have a secretary, named Claudia, and she can get in touch with us at anytime.You can reach me at alain@spaceobs.com. This is by far the best way to reach me, since I try to read my mail at least once a day, and make the reservations of the tours on average once a week (I need to go to the office to have the reservation book with me).
Who am I ?
Just because I have had this obsession of figuring nude on the internet, here it is :
I was born near Nancy in Lorraine way back in the late fifties. I have a little sister since 1965, which happens to be married with my brother in law, and together they have made a web site. So my roots are in Champigneulles, Frouard, Pompey and Liverdun, with part of my heart still fishing on the border of the Moselle river, in the backyard of my grand mother's house. The skies there are very poor on average, eventhough sometimes, mainly after a big storm, I have seen spectacular skies in the Lorraine countryside.
With such a sky, coming to astronomy was not evident, but eventually, a cousin of my mother which had built a 80mm refractor and had showed me Jupiter got me impressed. Then several pages and sky maps in a then well known encyclopédia aptly called "Tout l'Univers" got me more interested. My first observation was that of the solar eclipse of June 30th (the last day of school) 1973. After that I started to do some astronomy, I mean full time, the rest becoming stupid waste of time, like going to school and other things. Plus all these forced activities were quite incompatible with astronomy. I was able to get a foot in professional astronomy when Jean Louis Heudier got me for a training in 1978 at the OCA Schmidt telescope while I was studying photography at the then called "Ecole Nationale de la Photographie et du Cinéma". If I were not spending all my time with astronomy, I would find some time playing my accordeon.
A short description of my favorite astronomical activities could be described in these few keywords:
My main professional occupations :
I have worked at the O.C.A. Schmidt telescope from 1983 to 2000, and after
a 4 years interruption during which I worked as photographic scientist for the
Palomar Observatory Second Sky Survey.
After my return from Palomar, I have been in charge of telescope maintenance
and developement and have then been heading the Schmidt telescope. I had
a permanent position at C.N.R.S. as "ingénieur d'études" ( study engineer
? ), which I left in 2005.
With the help of many students, of the observatory direction of that time and
of individuals like Gerhard Hahn ( D.L.R. ) and Hans Scholl and Albert Bijaoui
( O.C.A. ) an automated asteroid discovery program was run for 30 months named
ODAS. Anybody familiar with the
art of acronyms would decipher this one as OCA DLR Asteroid Survey.
Starting in 1992, I have mostly worked on the construction of a large CCD camera
together with my colleagues, and this project after much difficult and learning
times started regular observations in October 1996 and was ended in March 1999
when DLR stopped contributing and OCA considered that the current detector was
too small and that it did not have the means to upgrade to a larger one (I am
running you the official version). My efforts to get a european asteroid survey
working in Europe started under the directorship of Philippe Delache, which
had been very supportive and helpful. The following directorship did promise
much more (most notably to the director of DLR), but in the end did exactly
the reverse, dividing the telescope's budget by a factor of ten and the crew
by a factor of 2. The final one did not promise anything, and simply made everything
possible to terminate the activity of the telescope, which it was able to do
in less than a year of activity.
Later I worked in Chile, first as survey engineer for the DeNIS project, then on the EROS2 program. This was more than enough to get
me really bored with the modern astronomical era of industrial ESO like astronomy,
also called "heavy science". It was heavily boring, with me counting
the observing nights left to do before going back to normal life. The only thing
interesting (apart from the salary, and the blocked observing periods, with
a lot of free time in between) was to be able to discover the chilean skies,
which made a return to France's ugly skies very hard to imagine for me. I will
now offer astronomical tourism services together with my new wife (we got married
on February 19th 2003). She studied "tourismo y hosteleria" and clearly
our current situation is really a product of both of us working on it. Making
this project of ours a reality has been very time consuming. We started to visit
San Pedro regularly after August 2002, and when I was not working in La Silla,
we were there. It took till June 2003 to find a correct house to buy, and another
11 months to conclude the purchase (to receive a foreign resident visa from
the chilean administration, create an enterprise, terminate the papers with
the bank). Then it took another 3 more months to be able to open our own agency.
Since the purchase of the house, I have worked to put a permanent telescope
in action. I am a member of the IAU since 1994, member of commission 20.
Amateur astronomy
On the side line, I have always continued to do some amateur observing. In the past, I tried to get at least a week of vacation per year in order to do some amateur stuff. Now, I don't have the excuse of not having a good sky, but little available time. Right now, the work I do is not productive, but I can sense already the progresses made, for example, since I have the telescope under a shelter, and am able to work from a control room inside the house. I still have this project of generating a set of color postcards of the sky for the business.
Now a little history:
In 1995, I have created a french speaking list named AUDE,
which allow now about 500 amateurs to discuss various topics concerning CCD
observations.
In 1996 and 1999, I helped organising les Rencontres sur les techniques de detection
en astronomie amateur in Carcassonne
When in France, I worked with ASSEM ( Animation Scientifiques Sud Est Mediterranee
), which is the regional delegation for ANSTJ,
now called "Planètes Sciences" and we have several activities
in astronomy. We usually organised several technical week ends on regular and
CCD observing, were together with the astronomy club of the region organising
public observing sessions, either for special events ( comet Hale Bopp for example
) or other less special opportunities. I was also involved in the ARGETAC association
which after much wait has a 40cm equatorially mounted telescope at the Caussols
site of the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur.
In Chile, I am having fun with both very clear skies and the southern hemisphere.
I have various instruments which I use both visually or
with a variety of CCD cameras or webcams.
In this context, the image below is Saturn. Image made by Jean Marc Mari and
Dominique Albanese at Caussols using my Celestron 14 telescope and Dominique
Albanese's Pictor 416 CCD camera... Saturn is my favorite planet, and it is
in a way amusing to see it in Gemini, i.e. at the same position in the sky where
I saw it for the first time, i.e. just a few years
ago... (something like a saturnian year, or 29 terrestrial years ). 
I have many other astronomical pictures but have for now removed the gallery page of the spaceobs.com web site.
I still enjoy observing the sky, and take a real pleasure showing the sky to people, taking advantage of looking at my favorite celestial objects. I don't see the point of looking at very faint objects. I spend quite a lot of my free time building different instruments. Either for my tours, of for my personal activities.
My solar system
I have discovered or co-discovered (marked with a * ) or simply was part of the gang which proposed the name of the following numbered asteroids and comets :