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
Eugene Merle Shoemaker Institute in 1965. Coming to Caltech in 1969, he started a systematic search for Earth orbit-crossing asteroids, which resulted in the discovery of several families of such asteroids, including the Apollo asteroids. Shoemaker advanced the idea that sudden geologic changes can arise from asteroid strikes and that asteroid strikes are common over geologic time periods. Previously, astroblemes were thought to be remnants of extinct volcanoes — even on the Moon. In 1993, he co-discovered Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 using the 18-inch Schmidt camera at Palomar Observatory. This comet was unique in that it provided the first opportunity to observe the planetary