The moon and the stars fascinated me since my early childhood days. However, besides the most common constellations I never knew much about the night sky and my observations were limited to a set of very small binoculars. It took me 16 years more to learn that the human eye is able to see more than a whole bunch of twinkling stars, and that the view on beautiful nebulas and galaxies is not limited to the Hubble Space Telescope and large observatories.

Motivated by astro photos and observation reports from amateur astronomers in the internet, I bought my first telescope in Winter 2000. It's a 10" Newton with Dobson mount and it gathers about 25 times more light than my old binoculars, allowing me to see the rings of Saturn, colorful star clusters or the spiral arms of faint galaxies. Nowadays I know many parts of the sky much better than the streets in my neighbourhood.

Sooner or later I would also like to get into astro photography, but right now I don't have the money for useful equipment yet. Since seeing nebulas and galaxies with your own eye is much more exciting than watching photographs, I'd rather get a bigger telescope than spending a fortune and computer controlled mounts and digital cameras.

Sometimes, when I'm not too busy I like to draw pictures. I wouldn't call myself a big time artist, but I think I'm not too bad either. I'm mainly using pencils, but recently I also started to use pastel chalks which turned out to work very well for me. My favourite motives are manga style figures and portraits (in particular females because I find the round lines much easier to draw than the angular parts of male bodies).

Drawing helps me to relax and to focus on new things and ideas. My work is not really productive though, therefore this hobby has a low priority amongst the others. I often wish I'd have more time to improve my drawing skills, but unfortunately there are so many other more important things to do first.

Photography is a rather new hobby of mine. Motivated by some photographers on the internet and in the need of high quality raw material for my webdesign projects i bought a Sony DCS-717 digital camera in winter 2002. Amazed at the stunning results of my very first pictures, I soon fell in love with digital photography.

Since then I see the whole world with different eyes. I permanently keep looking for interesting things around me and I think that my whole sense for colors has changed drastically. My favourite motives are macro shots of flowers and small animals. I hope that my pictures are able to capture the beauty of nature and to make you seeing things in a another light, too. Make sure to check out my photographic website for samples. My photographic work
Shots I took with my camera

Whenever I have nothing to do, I'm usually spending my time with reading books or online articles. My main areas of interest are computer science, philosophy and neurology. I barely read fiction. However, i have a complete collection of the Battletech series of science fiction novels. In case you don't know what to do with your money or you want to surprise me, make sure to check out my frequently updated Amazon wish list with several books in different price ranges. My Amazon wish list
Books I'd like to have

Collecting stamps was my first serious hobby. I don't remember the beginning, but i think it all started when my aunt gave me a couple of used envelopes with stamps on them. When I was about 7 or 8 years old, I ended up in a collectors club and began to collect used and mint stamps from Eastern Germany. My collection grew rapidly, but more and more I felt unsattisfied because I expected the GDR, my home country, to exist forever. Thus my collection would have never been complete.

So I focused on a country that did not exist anymore and discovered the German Empire (1872-1923) as my new passion. I swapped my collection of over 2000 stamps into 150 to 200 stamps from the German Empire. A couple of months later, history fooled me and my home country actually collapsed. However, I never regret my decision to swap my collection because the German Empire turned out to be a very exciting area. Specialists distinct between a variety of different color shades, watermarks, paper grades, perforations and several other properties (see image above). Some variants are very rare and hard to find, thus very expensive on the market. I'm still collecting German Empire stamps, and will probably continue for many more years to come.

Of course, as a computer scientist I'm also spending a hell lot of time in the internet. Below are some links to websites of friends and other interesting ressources related to my hobbies. Please note that I am not responsible for their content. DJ-Designs
Daniel 'dj' Jansson (english) Kallmann Online
Gerd Kallmann (german) The Way Of Myth
Robert Rodgers (english) traxter.de
Thomas 'TraXter' Kujawski (german) Yezar1ael
Yezariael (english)