Astrophotography

Well, since at that age “light pollution” wasn’t part of my vocabulary, I begged my parents to buy me a telescope and so I got a 70mm toy refractor (I can’t recall the brand either). Soon I was filled with books and star charts and many other things that I had no clue on how to use, but I was happy and that’s what matters. I even built my own wooden astrolabe. However, under those skies, there wasn’t much that I could see. Apart from the Moon and its craters (oh… how I remember looking at the Full Moon one evening without filters and becoming so blind I couldn’t walk to the bathroom) and resolving binary stars, the repertory of the celestial wonders never did fully materialize in my telescope. I was never able to locate the wonderful and colorful objects that would appear on magazines and to see them, even less. It wasn’t long before I would turn the telescope to terrestrial sightings. During the day, and much like Galileo, I would spend time gazing at the sea on the lookout for faraway ships. Finding the objects in daytime was much easier! Only that on a fatal afternoon, while holding the telescope on the windowsill of my fifteenth floor apartment searching for ships, on a split second I lost the grip and it just fell down the building. It got smashed to smithereens! After about six months of an intense relationship with the instrument that I don’t remember the brand, it was the end of it. There wasn’t a chance my parents would get me another one (I’d better learn to be more careful with my things…), and so, abruptly, I put Astronomy aside.

In 1990 we moved to NYC – another skyless city. During that period, not only the passion to Astronomy was dormant, but my knowledge of the sky even regressed, not being able even to recall the number of planets in our Solar System. The evening at the National Observatory in Rio was dead, gone and forgotten! After graduating from high school, I attended film school at Hunter College. I guess would just flee from anything that would ever do with science courses. Then again, apart the occasional visit to the Hayden Planetarium, growing my adolescence in NYC would make me think of anything other than the sky – which I couldn’t see anyway.

Following the events that took place in 2001, together with a few others in my personal life, I decided that NY was no longer the place to be and moved to Rome.

The move to Italy introduced me to another passion: winemaking! For wine-lovers: I produce the best well-kept secret wine varietal in the Italian panorama, the Cesanese di Affile. It is the only autoctonal red grape from the Roman region. Although it is an old roman wine, its DOC designation was out of production for almost thirty years, turning it almost into a legend – until, well, we came along! For info, this is the website.

The operations at the wine farm started in 2002. It is about 70km east of Rome, in a mountainous region with very few small towns (pop. ca. 1000) nearby. Thus, my dormant passion to astronomy started slowly to awaken. There the Milky Way still shows us its glow (well, ok… not like at Las Sillas or the Canaries, but one can still see it!) and the Andromeda Galaxy can be clearly seen with the naked eye. So, little by little, it would become difficult not to notice the beauty of a star-spangled sky. But it was only in 2006 that it finally “clicked” in me that, hey, I finally “could” get me a telescope, and eventually close the arc after twenty years. So I got one, along with the fever of all the rest that comes with it: goto mounts, observatory, CCD’s, filters, remote control, etc. – as many of you know too well.