Our story

We come from very different places.

We met in 2001 in Valparaíso, both studying Computer Engineering at Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, and we've been together since 2007.

The sky was already following us around. Jorge wrote his thesis on ALMA — in his words:

After that, each of us followed our own career as a software engineer… until 2020 came along.

Like everyone else, the pandemic had us shut in at home. Days went by, then weeks, then months. Around that time Jorge had the idea of buying a telescope, to see what we could explore from the backyard of our house in Peñalolén. That's how the Celestron NexStar 6SE came into our lives — we fondly named it “Celestín”.

And so, at the end of 2020, an adventure of constant learning began. There were surprises and frustrations too (lots of them!): when something we'd planned didn't work, when the weather let us down, and all the ones that simply come with learning. We learned to use the instruments and understand how they work, but we also learned about the sky and the universe.

That's how we took our first deep-sky astrophotos, straight from the backyard, in the middle of Santiago and under enormous light pollution. We discovered nebulae, mostly, and started sharing them on our Instagram account, @astropatiochile.

When the pandemic ended, we started going to the Cajón del Maipo to use the telescope under a darker sky. It was fun and, above all, fascinating: pointing at a patch of sky where you see nothing with the naked eye and discovering millions of stars, nebulae and objects that, at the time, we sometimes didn't even know what they were.

The more we learned, the more happened. We were learning to use the equipment, to capture and process astrophotography, and about the universe itself. We kept adding equipment with different strengths from what we already had, and we wanted ever darker skies.

That's how the William Optics Zenith Star 61 and GT81 refractors arrived — our “Willys”.

We started traveling to the Elqui Valley and to Río Hurtado. There we did a lot of astrophotography, with telescopes and with a very basic Canon DSLR. We did a lot of naked-eye observing and watched meteor showers. And so the Coquimbo Region became our favorite place.

At the end of 2024 we decided to look for a house in the Elqui Valley. We wanted to come more often, work remotely whenever we could and enjoy the night sky more nights a year. The dream came true in mid-2025.

Soon after, a new member arrived: an 8" f/4 Orion Newtonian telescope, ideal for photographing galaxies.

But this year, 2026, we wanted to go further. We felt the urge to share how wonderful the universe is and everything we had learned over the years. But we also wanted to make sure that what we shared was real, accurate and trustworthy information, and we knew we still had more to learn for that. So we enrolled in and completed the Diploma in Fundamentals of Astronomy at the Universidad de Chile.

And as if that weren't enough, two new members joined the family: a Sky-Watcher 300P Dobsonian and a Celestron C11.

We capped off August by traveling to Ponferrada, in Spain, to see the total solar eclipse of August 12.

We arrived several days early. We looked for the ideal spot and went there at the same time as the eclipse on the days before (it happened just before nightfall). That way we could picture what the experience would be like, decide where to set up and see what we still needed to pull it off.

We did it. We captured it with the William Optics Zenith Star 61 and the Canon DSLR, and also with a Vivo X300 Pro phone and its telephoto lens.

Experiencing a total eclipse was incredible, and so was going after it with equipment ready for the job. But what stayed with us was something else: sharing it with the people who started arriving. Several of them told us they set up there because they saw us with our telescopes up, hehe.

We showed them how to watch the eclipse safely, shared the live images from our cameras and told them fun facts about eclipses. In return, they told us about life in Ponferrada, its surroundings and its customs, and shared a little piece of their culture with us.

Here are photos of the place and the moment, and the videos we put together from what we captured with the telescope and the phone.