About Me

One evening in the early summer of 2002 in rural Colorado, I was skimming through the pages of our local newspaper the Huerfano World, looking for something to break the monotony of the summer doldrums. My eyes landed on an announcement for a star party at Horseshoe lake in Lathrop State Park, hosted by the Southern Colorado Astronomical Society (SCAS) out of Pueblo, Colorado. I wasn’t particularly interested in space at the time, but it seemed like a good way to spend the evening, so I convinced my dad to take me.

Out at the lake, the society had set up an array of telescopes, guiding everyone there to watch the sunset and witness the evening planets and stars emerge. Once I started looking through those telescopes, I was blown away. It was so incredible, so expansive. It sparked something inside me, and I just knew—this is what I want to do. I wanted to keep stargazing.

As luck would have it, my uncle Jeff had bought a backyard telescope at a garage sale years earlier but had never even opened it. It was a scrappy little telescope - held together with duct tape and tire wire. Over the next few months, I wrestled with it, trying and failing to figure out how to make it work. I spent hours twisting knobs and dials, always coming up short.

Then came a second stroke of luck: SCAS hosted another star party at Lathrop later that summer. I packed up my scrappy telescope and brought it along. The society members were incredibly helpful, teaching me the basics of finding targets in the sky. From that moment on, I was unstoppable.

I still vividly remember my first solo breakthrough. I even wrote down the time and date so I’d never forget it: September 23, 2002, at 5:40 p.m. That’s when I used my telescope to find my first object on my own—Venus. I was in 8th grade and 13 years old when my life changed. 

All during high school, I was out with my telescope every night as soon as I finished my homework. The astronomical society in Pueblo had a phone line you could call daily to learn about upcoming celestial events and where to point your telescope. I called it religiously. My Christmas wish lists transformed into books about astronomy, and I memorized all the constellations.

Astronomy made me a better person. Thinking of the vastness of space made me realize how fragile our Earth is and inspired me to become an environmentalist and social justice worker. 

During the summers in high school, I worked for my family's construction company (TTT), a job that instilled a strong work ethic in me. Every penny I earned was saved for a new telescope - an eight inch Orion Dobsonian. I still have this telescope and use it regularly. 

It wasn’t until my junior year of high school that I even considered the possibility of becoming more than just an amateur astronomer. That year, I applied to and was accepted into Astronomy Camp at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. With a full-ride scholarship, I found myself on one of Arizona’s mountaintops, surrounded by telescopes. 

The camp was two weeks of living the life of a professional astronomer—attending lectures, working on proposals, and using university telescopes to gather data. One unforgettable experience was observing my first exoplanet transit. That moment cemented my desire to pursue astronomy as a career and to study exoplanets. 

The rest is history.