I am Tõnis Eenmäe, a research fellow at Tartu Observatory in Estonia. I started to enjoy astronomy and optics at the end of primary school (in the end of 1980s), few years after diving into photography, when I received a simple East German plastic telescope kit. When playing around with that little telescope-like thingie, at some point it was natural to point it towards the Moon. And then I was hooked. Probably for life!
A lot of experimenting with different telescopes and cameras followed and that has continued till nowadays.Decision to become an astronomer came quickly and that led to studying physics and astrophysics in Tartu University. In parallel to studies, I started early with spectroscopic observations of massive stars (Be stars, hot and cool super- and hypergiants, binary stars of differents species, etc) using the 1.5-meter telescope of our observatory, photometry followed some years later. Later, I had to take the responsibility of leading different instrumentation projects to improve observing capabilities of our telescopes.
Around 15 years ago I found Cristian Buil's treasure box and learned that amateur astronomy community is doing wonderful things. I have been amazed about the perfomance of those small, yet very capable spectrographs, clever designs, well documented analysis methods, convenient programs etc. Finding ARAS group was just a logical step...
Best regards,
Tõnis