The now (as of 2003) decommissioned Ariane 4 launch pad. To the left is the moving protection building which shielded the rocket from weather during launch operations. To the right is the tower containing the umbilical fuelling and power lines, as well as a lightning conductor. In the centre foreground is the rocket transport vehicle which moved the upright rocket from the assembly buildings to the pad. The round structure behind is the water tower used for cooling and acoustic dampening on launch.
The Ariane 5 pad is about half a kilometre to the left of this photo. The new Vega launch pad, under construction as of 2007, is obscured by the umbilical tower. The Soyuz pad is being constructed several kilometres further north from here. The assembly buildings are to the south, behind the camera.

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The Guiana Space Centre or, more commonly, Centre Spatial Guyanais (CSG) is a French and European spaceportnear Kourou in French Guiana. Operational since 1968, it is particularly suitable as a location for a spaceport as it fulfills the two major geographical requirements of such a site:

• it is quite close to the equator, so that the spinning earth can impart some extra velocity to the rockets for free when launched eastward, and
• it has uninhabited territory (in this case, open sea) to the east, so that lower stages of rockets and debris from launch failures cannot fall on human habitations.

The European Space Agency, the French space agency CNES, and the commercial Arianespace company conduct launches from Kourou. This is the spaceport used by the ESA to send supplies to the International Space Stationusing the Automated Transfer Vehicle.

The location was selected in 1964 to become the spaceport of France. When the European Space Agency (ESA) was founded in 1975, France offered to share Kourou with ESA. Commercial launches are bought also by non-European companies. ESA pays two thirds of the spaceport’s annual budget and has also financed the upgrades made during the development of the Ariane launchers.

Cadran solaire multiple de type Bloud

Description :

2e moitié du 18e siècle

Auteur :

Bloud Charles (actif 1653-1686?)

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Charles Bloud and his brother, based in Dieppe, created ivory sundial. He started to sign his work around 1655, but disappeared after 1685 and the revocation of Edit de Nantes. He and his brother refused to convert to Catholicism. 

This sundial is inspired from his work.

Marguerite Perey, French radiochemist. Copyright ULP

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Marguerite Catherine Perey (19 October 1909 – 13 May 1975) was a French physicist. In 1939, Perey discovered the element francium by purifying samples of lanthanum that contained actinium. She was a student of Marie Curie. In 1962, she was the first woman to be elected to the FrenchAcadémie des Sciences, an honor denied to her mentor Curie. Perey died of cancer in 1975.

willigula:

Three details from Nouvelle Carte De La Sphere Pour Faire Connaître Les Divers Mouvemens Des Planetes by Henri Chatelain, c. 1720

Objets d’art

Titre :

Microscope

Crédit photographique :

(C) RMN-Grand Palais / Hervé Lewandowski

Localisation :

Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts

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N°. 4 – Premier voyage aérien Pilâtre de Rozier et d’Arlandes (1783)
First aerial voyage with Pilâtre de Rozier and d’Arlandes · Erste Flugreise mit Pilâtre de Rozier und d’Arlandes

Medium: 10 prints (ephemera) (1 sheet) : chromolithograph.
Created/published: Paris : Romanet & cie., imp. edit., [between 1890 and 1900]
Notes: sheet of 10 uncut cards, individually captioned and numbered; issued as “Collection 476,” “1^re série.”; French captions on each card; Tissandier collection.

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The first clearly recorded instance of a balloon carrying passengers used hot air to generate buoyancy and was built by the brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier in Annonay, Ardeche, France. After experimenting with unmanned balloons and flights with animals, the first tethered balloon flight with humans on board took place on October 15, 1783. Etienne Montgolfier made at least one tethered flight from the yard of the Reveillon workshop in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. It was most likely on October 15, 1783. A little while later on that same day, Pilatre de Rozier became the second to ascend into the air, to an altitude of 80 ft (24 m) which was the length of the tether. The first free flight with human passengers took place on November 21, 1783. King Louis XVI had originally decreed that condemned criminals would be the first pilots, but de Rozier, along with Marquis François d’Arlandes, successfully petitioned for the honor. The first military use of a hot air balloon happened during the battle of Fleurus (1794) where the French used the balloon l’Entreprenant as an observation post

Longcase Regulator with Equation Work and Calendar (Régulateur à equation), ca. 1768–70
Movement by Ferdinand Berthoud (French, 1727–1807); Case by Balthazar Lieutaud (French, ca. 1720–1780)
Case: oak veneered with ebony, with gilt-bronze mounts and glass panel; Dial: white enamel with black numerals; Movement: brass and steel

90 1/2 x 21 1/2 x 12 3/4 in. (229.87 x 54.61 x 32.39 cm)
The Jack and Belle Linsky Collection, 1982 (1982.60.50)

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The case, designed in a severe Neoclassical style with added Chinese ornamental motifs, was made by one of the leading cabinetmakers, or ébénistes, of mid-eighteenth-century Paris. It is fitted with a tall glass panel in the trunk for the prominent display of the characteristically heavy French version of the gridiron pendulum that regulates the escapement of the movement. The dial displays hours, minutes, and seconds indicated by a spray of concentrically mounted hands. The minute hand, ornamented with a sunburst, was originally intended to show true solar time. (The hand for mean solar time is now missing.) Berthoud made a specialty of equation timepieces: clocks and watches that show both true solar time, which varies slightly according to the season of the year, and mean solar time, which does not. His first equation clock was approved by the French Académie des Sciences in 1752.