My name is Jürgen Stöger, born in 1971, and now living with my family in Katzelsdorf, near Wiener Neustadt, Austria.
Without a doubt, astronomy has become and probably always will be one of my greatest passions. I have been observing the night sky since 1984. It all started with a tiny, extendable Eschenbach 20×30 spotting scope (monocular) and continued a few years later with a 4.5 “Newtonian reflecting telescope that gave me impressive views of our moon, Jupiter and Saturn.
I was inspired by the legendary US-american astronomer Carl Sagan who said that science is more than a body of knowledge. It’s a way of thinking, a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. Sagan’s TV series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage and the pale blue dot fascinated me from the beginning.
The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 at a distance of 6 billion kilometers from the Sun.
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
Earth and Moon taken Oct. 3, 2007, by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter at a distance of 142 million kilometers.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. t has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
Carl Sagan, 1994
My astronomical interests are manifold, ranging from visual observing and crafting sketches to photographing. Mainly I am visual observer, watching the planets of our solar system such as Mars, Jupiter and Saturn as well as observing deep sky objects such as star clusters, galactic nebulae and galaxies.
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Jürgen Stöger, December 2008