I'm Eric Wolgemuth, and I got hooked on astronomy in first grade when my folks bought me a small, cardboard 3" reflector that we took to a community-college viewing night out in the Mojave. They lined us up by the size of our scopes, mine sat at the very end of the row, and through it I saw Saturn — a blob with ears. It stuck.
A college lab TA job in astronomy at the University of Puget Sound led to a summer programming gig at the Institute for Astronomy at UH Manoa in FORTRAN (seriously???), and that landed me, a couple of years later, as a telescope operator on Mauna Kea in the mid-1980s.
My stint on the mountain was awesome but project-term-limited, and I returned to the Pacific Northwest, where I fell into database work (anybody remember dBase? FoxPro? Paradox?) and ended up hanging out my shingle as a database consultant, having migrated into MS Access and MySQL.
During the mid-2000s I gave in to a longstanding urge to put my physics degree to work and began a second career teaching physics, astronomy (hah!), and computer science to high school students.
The best part came late: a rock star student and I chased exoplanets with a basic Celestron and a ZWO ASI2600MC camera, and using AstroImageJ he pulled down an actual light curve. An anonymous benefactor heard about that and donated a Tele Vue NP127is to me personally, and I quickly upgraded to a Sky-Watcher EQ6-R Pro, a FocusLynx focuser, and a ZWO seven-position filter wheel (Ha, SII, OIII, R, G, B).
In my last few years there I instituted what I believe to be a one-of-a-kind observing program for a motivated group of students — no books, no tests, no projects — just cold nights with cranky equipment, unpredictable software, and long, long hours with Photoshop back in the lab.
A lifetime interest in astronomy, thirty years of databases, and a career of teaching turned out to be one long apprenticeship for the same job. So the shingle is back out — Blueshift, one word now — and it's me and a small cadre of former students who never quite escaped the lab.
We can't be all things to all users, but we can be most things to most users.
Our goal is to make Blueshift as useful as we can to as many users as we can. We will work with you to develop new and expanded features, always doing our best at offering multiple paths through multiple problems so you can choose the one that fits the way you already work.