Jürgen Stock (astronomer)

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.