Introduction

This observatory is an over 30 years dream... I started astronomy when I was 10-12 years old and I still remember my 14th christmas when I found a Perl 115/900 telescope under the tree - what a magical moment for me!

In 1994, I purchased a Celestron 8 inches telescope, very handy to travel around. But I was looking for larger aperture and switched to a Celestron 11 inches and a Losmandy Titan around 2004. I still have this equipment wich traveled a lot around, but are now looking forward for a permanent position...

In 2006 I co-founded Shellyak Instruments company whose goal is to promote astronomical spectroscopy; we quickly became leader in this area with a wide product range from the recent Alpy 600 to the eShel optical fiber echelle spectrograph, with LISA high luminosity and Lhires III high resolution spectrographs. I personally needed a place to do more spectroscopy and work more with our products.

This is how I slowly but finally started the project for the observatory, located on "route de la belle étoile" (road of the beautiful star) - so it naturally took the name of Observatoire de la belle étoile!