The expensive telescope they gave me was nothing compared to the one I had seen at the optician-store a few years earlier, as it did not have all those mechanical wonders that equatorial mounts had in the 80's, full of protruding knobs ready to be turned and cause some complex movement of the telescope to the eyes of a child... Well, my story goes a bit wrong at this point: I got a 60mm F/11 refractor on a wobbling wooden tripod, and the only thing I could see was a Moon, and unpredictable blurry planetary, and I had no idea other objects existed to be seen through a telescope.. Stars looked no different with a telescope My astronomy suffered an intermission here! Instead I found out I liked to take pictures wasting photographic rolls..Years later, boring or demanding work came, along with stressing student work, and I had to resort to some sort of hobby to keep my mental sanity. So I decided to recover the hobby of photography, now in the flourishing digital era, and take pictures of birds! Incidentally, the cheapest high-quality manual focus photographic objective I could research was an APO telescope optical tube. Then the winter came and the birds went! I was only left with the sky to take pictures at. This was how my astronomy interest was "rebooted", and I realised that the reason I saw blurry objects in my old telescope was not the telescope itself, but the eyepieces!!!!! Plastic eyepieces have put a stop of more than 12 years on my Astronomy.. (This also meant I "entered" astronomy already with a graduate degree in Computer Science, and a technical taste for research and problem-solving -- Nice tools!)
Well, I like photography because it takes a sample of space in time. Moving stuff can be frozen in an image or distorted depending on their relative movement and varying "photographic parameters".. Movement itself is a spacial change along time.. I was always fascinated with what can be seen changing or not in a given portion of time.. So I started sampling bird movement on mid air with a moving background; then involuntarily started sampling star movement due to periodic error of mounts, lack of guiding, or polar misalignment; later, comet/asteroid movement between quiet stars, and even planetary movement.. It was not long before I would discover various other unseen movements visible only thanks to Doppler shifts... ...and a spectrograph.
So, summarizing: I am here because things have been seen changing in time
Geographically, I am in Portugal, usually in the area of Lisbon, or the south of the country (Algarve).
Instrumentally, I am exploring spectroscopy with Lhires III (2400 or 300 l/mm), 8.3" Cassegrain, being still a novice in the post-acquisition stages of spectroscopy..
(I hope to read this again at a later time with good memories 
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