THE MUSIC AND ME:

I was born on October 25, 1993 in Santiago de Chile.

From a very young age (so much so that I can't remember exactly from what age) I was surrounded by music in my immediate environment. When I was little, there were always cassettes of all kinds of music on the radio, from classical music to boleros, "the new wave", cumbia, salsa, Latin American rock and Anglo rock, among other things, which aroused my interest in music as such.

My maternal uncle Felipe played percussion in different bands and even more so, he began to study Percussion at the Catholic University, always within tropical and Latin American music.

On the other hand, my mom played an acoustic guitar (I don't remember the brand) that my dad gave her when they were together. She played songs by U2, Pink Floyd and Whitesnake. Likewise, my dad is the most fanatical person in the universe of little-known boys with very limited ability to compose music, such Pink Floyd, so in this way, my early interest in music began to take shape.

However, it wasn't until Christmas 1999 that my dad sent me from La Serena with a great family friend, Ruben Mena (R.I.P.) my first ¾ size acoustic guitar. My mom taught me the first chords (A, E, D) and I spent a few weeks learning it. One day my godfather Tony arrived, with some bolero songs that he liked to sing, where I internalized myself in the infinite possibilities that exist to make a song. Well, I wasn't interested in boleros as such, but the drawings of the different chords really caught my attention, which helped me in an impressive way to overcome the first great barrier of every beginning guitarist, the F major: a chord in the which must press all the strings with one finger and with the other 3 make a very unnatural posture for someone who is just starting out.

When I got a little older, I got fully involved in the world of video-games, and without realizing it, one of the things I enjoyed the most (and still do) were the soundtracks, but everything changed when I played one of my favorite video-games. Lifetime: Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, a third-person game that was basically about going with a sword and defeating enemies with heavy metal music playing in the background. When I was finally able to finish it, the credits song came: Straight out of line by Godsmack and at that moment, I realized that there was no point of return, rock became part of my life, I began to explore more songs and more bands. From heavy metal as such, mainly Iron Maiden, through thrash metal with the Big 4, and death and black metal with bands like Mayhem, Immortal and Cannibal Corpse. I asked my mom to buy me black t-shirts, I wanted to wear chains, a leather jacket (even in summer time), boots, wristbands, and whatever else I could think of to show externally (perhaps) what I was passionate about at that moment, to this Of course, we must add the pre-adolescent context and the famous "puberty age”.

By then, I was playing death metal on my ¾ guitar that my dad had given me when I was 8 or 9 years old, so when I turned 15, my dad saw that passion in me and gave me my first electric guitar: a Squier affinity from very well built, one of those that don't exist anymore, in addition to a Marshall MG15 CD amplifier, cables, bag and a Digitech RP250 multi-effect to make it explode, which until then was my absolute passion.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND ME

A couple of years later, I began to delve into other areas that caught my attention, including languages, but not the typical English that you see everywhere. I was struck by the entire phonetic and linguistic structure of the Slavic languages. So, I began to study on my own using online translators and low-quality videos... My great advances were learning to read the Cyrillic alphabet, order a beer in Croatian, and say hello in languages as unknown in this part of the world as Croatian. Ukrainian and Bulgarian. Added to this is another interest that I developed more or less simultaneously, it was history, especially that of Eastern Europe, Slavic countries and those that were part of the Byzantine Empire.

Now comes the part of my adolescence in which I had to decide what I wanted to study, I searched high and low for a career that included music in the Cyrillic alphabet and history of Latvia and its involvement in the dissolution of Kievan Rus' but to my surprise, there was not and will not be anything even close to that. Finally, I thought further and found that the field of study of International Relations, Military Strategy and Security suits quite well, so I studied Public Administration at the University of Valparaíso, which is a career with many possibilities of specialization in said fields. areas. In fact, in 2021 I did a Postgraduate Diploma in International Studies and I am currently evaluating the possibility of doing a Master's degree related to the subject.

ASTRONOMY

Curiously, astronomy is the last of the interests that I have begun to have. When the COVID-19 Pandemic arrived in Chile in 2020, like many people, I had a lot of free time where reels about scientific dissemination began to appear on my social networks, which led me to become more interested in science, mainly in science. astronomy.

But hey, your dad is a scientist, he has worked on many projects of high scientific value... how come you got interested in astronomy for a few reels?

For most of my life, astronomy was so mundane that it wasn't a big deal to me. My father always took my brothers and me to see observatories, to his workplace, explaining to us each of the doubts that arose, but that was for me until then, an area in which I was not sufficiently interested when I had the chance.

Returning to the Pandemic, I became interested to the point of buying my first books of the type “Basic Concepts-of-Astrophysics-for-People-who-don't-remember-how-to-Divide". Conceptual questions arose and, surprise! I have my dad a WhatsApp/call away to ask him anything related to that field. It was there when I realized how much I was missing from this fabulous world, which in parallel, we enjoyed together with my brothers as they began to put together this Cluster One Observatory concept, doing astrophotography and finding a new interest in common.

Of the 4, I think I am the one with the least technical knowledge of astronomy and photography, however, I am very excited and eager to learn and be a contribution to this wonderful project, and what better than with my family.