Jürgen Stock

Jürgen Stock (8 July 1923 – 19 March 2004) was a German astronomer, best known for discovering the site of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile after a two year search starting in 1960, and was its first director from 1962 to 1965. Stock was bilingual, studied at the University of Hamburg and graduated under Otto Heckmann. In the 1950s he worked at Case-Western Reserve University and Boyden Observatory in South Africa, which uniquely linked him to scientific initiatives in both the northern and southern hemisphere. In 1971, he established the Llano del Hato National Astronomical Observatory, the Venezuelan National Observatory, of which he was a temporary director. The asteroid 4388 Jürgenstock was named after him.

Early life and education Jürgen Stock was born in Hamburg on 8 July 1923. His father owned an import business and the family moved to Mexico City in 1925. While German was his native language, he was exposed to Spanish until his return to Germany in 1929 when he was six. He attended Gymnasium in Hamburg.

Stock was not allowed to attend university during the NS regime, because he could not prove his non-Jewish ancestry. During World War II, he was drafted into the German army and during the last year fought on the Russian front. After the war he studied at the University of Hamburg. In 1951, he graduated under Otto Heckmann as his Ph.D. thesis advisor. after which he returned to Hamburg. In 1956, Heckmann assigned him to the Boyden Observatory in South Africa for a year. There, European astronomers were evaluating possible sites for the construction of an observatory. Stock would have collaborated with them in this task, gaining experience in site testing.

In 1958, Stock moved to Cleveland again joining the astronomical faculty of the Case Institute of Technology (now Case-Western Reserve University). He came into contact with Gerard P. Kuiper, professor at the University of Chicago, directing the Yerkes Observatory and McDonald Observatories, following a book chapter that Kuiper was coordinating. Kuiper learned of Stock’s ideas regarding the evaluation of astronomical sites. Kuiper offered him to take over the preliminary study, and Stock traveled to Chile, first briefly, in 1959.