2023 Father Victor L. Badillo Astronomy Service Award

ALPer Raymund Sarmiento is this year’s Father Victor L. Badillo Astronomy Service Awardee for 2023 for his “For his innovative development of EQMOD, an open source telescope mount control software, which greatly aided astronomers worldwide.”

Raymund is the Senior Vice President and Chief Technical Officer of GMA New Media, the technology arm of GMA Network.

Serving as CTO of GMA New Media for the past 20 years, he is the co-inventor of some of the R&D projects for the organization, with patents obtained and applied locally and abroad.

He has extensive experience in AI and robotics, recently creating from scratch a Rubiks Cube Solver Robot.

An amateur astronomer as well as member of ALP since 2004,  he also developed a Telescope Observatory / Automation algorithm called EQMOD, which he launched as an open source project in 2006. It remains active to this day.