I’m Guillaume, I was born in 1991 in Strasbourg (France) I spent all of my studies there and I joined the CALENDS team in Lyon for my master internship and with not so much hesitations for my PhD on the same subject. My passion for astronomy appeared with my first telescope nine years ago, and since this date this passion grows up each day of each year to lead me in astrophysical studies and did internships in astronomy on astrometry and X-ray binaries. But now I start my PhD on gravitational lensing.

One of a CALENDerS subject is to study distant sources. But before studying them, you have to find them, especially when you observe a lensing clusters. A lensing cluster is a group of galaxies, containing stars, gas and Dark Matter which deform enough the space-time to curve the path of light. To find them, with 2D images which are deeper and deeper, I would like to use the knowledge of lensing properties and galaxies in a new software which I developed and named MISE (for Multiple Images Searcher).

Indeed, sometimes in the core of clusters you have several images of the same source and I want to find them all. In addition, to find correctly these images you have to model your galaxy cluster, and this is the other big part of my PhD, because with this correct modelisation you can provide lots of constraints by example on the cosmology of our Universe.

Recently I produced a 2 minutes video (in French) about my PhD for the International year of light. You can find it here.

This December Vera and I (Johan) were part of the observing crew on MUSE, to perform observations on the Very Large Telescope as part of the Guaranteed Time, together with Lutz from Potsdam and Monica from Leiden. We spent a bit more than a week on the mountain and had almost ideal conditions for most of the run, which was very fruitful!

We also enjoyed being in the middle of the Atacama desert, with amazing views and colourful sunsets.

All CALENDers have gathered early december in a nice hotel near Montpellier
for the general kick-off meeting. This was organised as a joint kick-off
between the CALENDS team, the MUSICOS team (another ERC-funded project dedicated
to diffuse gas emission from MUSE), and the FOGHAR team (an ANR-funded
collaborative project between Lyon and Toulouse institutes for the analysis
of MUSE data). Indeed, all three projects started within the last year, and we
decided to coordinate the efforts related to the analysis of MUSE data,
in particular the deep fields.

It was overall very productive and interesting to learn about each other’s
projects, in particular with students and postdocs coming from a different
academic background (software engineering, astrophysics, signal processing).
We all came back with many new ideas and plan for the future of CALENDS.
We also enjoyed sharing the ‘CALENDS car’ for the trip, and the company of
the giant cat which soon became the mascot of the meeting.

After a few months of latent hard work with little news on this page, the CALENDS
project gets a fresh new start with the arrival of our new recruits!

MUSE is now fully commissioned, and we started the first science observations in
September and October. One of the lensing clusters observed during commissioning was
analysed and the results published in the first CALENDS paper:

We also have a brand new logo! Thanks to Guillaume and Benjamin for working on it.

In the next entries we will introduce each of the team members with their past, current
and future projects. Stay tuned for more news !