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Contact information
e-mail
volker@spiegelteam.de
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website
www.spiegelteam.de
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Locator Map
http://www.frappr.com/apppublic
Level of accuracy: Germany
Biography
I was born in 1971 at
Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Germany. I still live in the area -- called “Pfalz”,
about 80 kilometers southwest of Frankfurt/Main, where I work for the
government.
I had my first contact with astronomy at
age 4 when my grandma showed me the moon with a little refractor through
an open window. However, I did not become interested in astronomy until
many years later when a friend explained the constellations to me. I then
bought a 114mm
Newtonian. Because of my interest in daylight photography, I attached a
camera with a 50mm lens and a 1000 ASA film to get a feeling of what was
possible in imaging the night sky. On my very first roll of film I
recorded a very bright meteor and the photo was published in a German book
about astrophotography -- this was the point of no return for me. The
next few years I used a C8, C11 and finally dedicated astrographs -- a
15-inch Newtonian and a 12-inch f/3-Deltagraph from Philipp Keller. These
latter two instruments pushed my results to new levels.
Together
with two friends I founded the "Spiegelteam" in 1998 to coordinate our
efforts. We did a lot of medium format b&w and LRGB film work with Kodak
Technical Pan 6415. At this stage I was fortunate to learn image
processing with a lot of help from Dr. Ernst Brodkorb. Seeing some
of the fantastic published results of amateur CCD imagers, I started CCD
imaging for myself in 2002. Having excellent equipment and some good
processing skills from the film days helped to a make for a quick
transition form silver to silicon. The CCD has allowed my buddy Bernd
Flach-Wilken and I to collaborate as a team -- "Spiegelteam" -- even
though we do not live next door to each other.
Because of the bad weather here in Germany and especially the light
pollution problems where I live, I began traveling to dark sites for
astrophotography. I was out many a night in the "Pfälzer Wald", the
largest forest in Germany and later on to Gornergrat in Switzerland.
There at an altitude of 3150
meters, I was surrounded by more than 20 mountains over 4000 meters,
including the famous "Matterhorn". It was a very special highlight in my life. In 1998, 2002 and 2004
I traveled south to Namibia for
astrophotography with my buddy Bernd Flach-Wilken.
In the past years many of the Spiegelteam images were published in
international astronomy magazines and also used in advertisements.
Area of interest
long
focal length high-resolution astrophotography
Observing sites
Germany and Namibia
Astronomical Equipment
Telescope
15" f/4.6 Newtonian
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CCD camera
SBIG
ST10XME
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