Fabien ChéreauFabien Chéreau (born 17 September 1980 in Villefranche-sur-Saône

Villefranche-sur-Saône

Villefranche-sur-Saône is a commune in the Rhône department in eastern France.It lies 1 mile west of the Saône River, and is around north of Lyon...

, France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

) is a French Research Engineer and computer programmer

Programmer

A programmer, computer programmer or coder is someone who writes computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computer programming or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software. One who practices or professes a formal approach to...

 best known for authoring the planetarium

Planetarium

A planetarium is a theatre built primarily for presenting educational and entertaining shows about astronomy and the night sky, or for training in celestial navigation...

 software Stellarium, a free, open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 astronomy software package which renders 3D photo-realistic skies in real time

Real-time computing

In computer science, real-time computing , or reactive computing, is the study of hardware and software systems that are subject to a "real-time constraint"— e.g. operational deadlines from event to system response. Real-time programs must guarantee response within strict time constraints...

.

He previously worked as a Research Engineer at the Paris Astronomical Observatory for the satellite GAIA of European Space Agency

European Space Agency

The European Space Agency , established in 1975, is an intergovernmental organisation dedicated to the exploration of space, currently with 18 member states...

 on a CNES-funded position for the On-board Detection and the Radial Velocity Spectrometer working groups. He worked in ESO on a plugin for Stellarium, called VirGO, from April 2008 to 2010.

Chéreau wrote the first version of the Gaia on-board detection algorithm. He worked on the definition of the Spectro sky mappers and was in charge of the development of the algorithms for these instruments.

Education

After graduating from Lycée du Val de Saône, Trévoux in Science with majors in Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Industrial Technology, he enrolled in INSA, the French engineering university at Lyon in France. Later he studied his final year as an exchange student in the Tampere University of Technology, Finland. Chéreau achieved his Master's Degree (Diplôme d'Ingénieur) in Computer Science at the National Institute of Applied Sciences of Lyon, France.

Personal projects

Since summer 2000, Chéreau is working on the free, open source astronomy software Stellarium in C++/OpenGL during his spare time.
He also programmed "The Biotes" an experimental artificial life program (in C++) which experiments neural networks and evolution algorithms.

Interests

Chéreau's interest in observations, calculations and astronomy helped in the creation of Stellarium.

External links

• Stellarium Official website for Stellarium.
• ESO European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere.
• VirGO VirGO, a plugin for Stellarium.