Thierry Legault Thierry Legault Thierry Legault (born 1962, chinese name :特厄力‧立夠) is a French amateur astronomer, specializing in astrophotography. An engineer by trade, he started astrophotography in 1993 and resorted to CCD cameras to photograph the deep sky. He then joined the "Association des utilisateurs de détecteurs electroniques (l'AUDE)", which aims to develop astronomical observation based on electronic detectors. In 1994, along with Christian Buil, he participated in a mission at the Pic du Midi Observatory on the collision of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter and launched himself into planetary photography. He is the first amateur to have shown on his photographs
Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 carbon disulfide persisted in the atmosphere for at least fourteen months after the collisions, with a considerable amount of ammonia being present in the stratosphere as opposed to its normal location in the troposphere. Counterintuitively, the atmospheric temperature dropped to normal levels much more quickly at the larger impact sites than at the smaller sites: at the larger impact sites, temperatures were elevated over a region wide, but dropped back to normal levels within a week of the impact. At smaller sites, temperatures higher than the surroundings persisted for almost two weeks. Global stratospheric temperatures rose immediately after the impacts,