Diedrich Wattenberg

Diedrich Wattenberg (13 June 1909 – 26 November 1996) was a German astronomer. He was a prolific populariser, writer and speaker on his subject, becoming in the 1950s a familiar presence on radio and, later, television programmes.

Life Wattenberg was born in a downstream suburb of Bremen in 1909. His father was a coppersmith. For economic reasons there was no possibility of his attending a secondary school, and he therefore trained for work as a government official. A decisive experience came in 1924 when Wattenberg attended a presentation by the writer Bruno H. Bürgel, who was reading extracts from his autobiography, Vom Arbeiter zum Astronomen ("From a worker to an astronomer"). In 1928, he got to know Friedrich Simon Archenhold at the Treptow Observatory (as it was then called) in Berlin. Wattenberg quickly became a regular contributor to a journal called Das Weltall ("The Universe") of which Archenhold was the editor in chief. Largely self-taught, during the 1930s he was writing regularly on astronomy.

Autobiography Diedrich Wattenberg's autobiography appeared in 1984 under the title Starry heaven above me - the inextricable in my life ("Gestirnter Himmel über mir – Unverlierbares aus meinem Leben").