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Bernd Flach-Wilken |
Bernd Flach-Wilken and Volker Wendel are the "Spiegelteam" from Germany. Many of their images are the result of their collaboration over the years, and together they maintain the Spiegelteam web site where their images are regularly published. This collaboration has produced some of the finest CCD images we have ever seen. The Spiegelteam is known for producing deep, high resolution images that are among the best amateur images in the world.
Bernd lives in Germany in the famous Westerwald, about half of the distance between the cities of Köln and Frankfurt. He first came into contact with Astronomy in 1968 as a 16 year old pupil during a school outing to the Belgium Ardennes. After studying the constellations and observing the night sky with 8x50 binoculars for a time, he became interested in observing the moon and the planets. In 1970 he built his first telescope, 150 mm catadioptic f/20 Schiefspiegler with optics from the late Dieter Lichtenknecker. This telescope produced some unforgettable nights of viewing the moon and planets, particularly during the close Mars opposition 1971. Bernd also published his first astrophotos in German magazines with this system.
In the early 1980's Bernd began building a larger, 300 mm Kutter-Schiefspiegler, again with optics from the Dieter Lichtenknecker, who produced these optics for himself but never finished building an instrument with them.
"All that I saw with my 6 inch-Kutter, I now could observe with much deeper intensity and with much more ease and even passion. I use this instrument today. The well-known Eskimo Nebula was done with this 12" instrument for example."
Slowly Bernd's interest in deep-sky observations grew and he began to take a greater interest in photographing deep space objects in addition to the moon and the planets. In 1987 he purchased a 940mm f/3.2 Flatfieldcamera from D. Lichtenknecker and started taking pictures with hypered Tech Pan film of many red emission nebulas.
"...But first I had to train on this diva of an instrument for 2 years before earning the first negative with pinpoint stars to the 6x6cm edges."
As the light pollution grew worse in his home town, Bernd began to travel to darker sites for his observations. It was in the mountains of Switzerland (Gornergrat) where he met Volker Wendel who would eventually become his Spiegelteam partner. In 1995, after buying his first computer, Bernd began to experiment with CCD imaging with an ST-6. In 1998 he managed to get one of the first 16" Hypergraph instruments from Philipp Keller, the twin of which is now installed in Namibia by his friend Bernd Schröter for rent to interested amateurs. Since 2002 Bernd has visited the Namibian farm TIVOLI every year for about 2 weeks for observations with the southern Hypergraph under very favorable dark skies. At home in Germany, the northern Hypergraph is Bernd's most used instrument, even though his observing site is not so favorable amid a town of 6000 inhabitants.
"The mounting I use since 1983 is a self-built one, with 80mm axis of steel and a high precision 360 teeth gear from Eckard Alt. For better seeing, I use no dome or hut. I observe under the open sky, with my instruments inside the house during bad weather (most of the time here in W-Europe)."
Bernd is a member of the German amateur association, Vereinigung der Sternfreunde. His inspiration came from reading the periodicals Sterne und Weltraum, Orion, and Sky & Telescope. He currently uses an ST-10XME and STL-6303E with AO-L Adaptive Optics.
Spiegelteam images have been published in ORION (Switzerland), Sterne und Weltraum (Germany), VdS-Journal (Germany), Interstellarum (Germany), Ciel et Espace (France), and Sky and Telescope (USA) among others. Several Spiegelteam images have been seen in SBIG's full page ads in Sky & Telesocpe, Night Sky, and Astronomy Magazine.
SBIG is proud to present our Award for Excellence in Astronomical Imaging to Bernd and honored to welcome him to our Hall of Fame. Below is a small sampling of some of the Spiegelteam's work. Click on an image to enlarge. For details of these images, and to see more of the Spiegelteam's work, please visit their web site at http://www.spiegelteam.de
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Bernd at Gornergrat in Switzerland ... |
... and with the 16" Hypergraph in Namibia |