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Volker Wendel |
Volker Wendel and Bernd Flach-Wilken 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.
Born in 1971, Volker currently works for the government of his birthplace, Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Germany. He now lives in an area called Pfalz which is located about 80 kilometers southwest of Frankfurt/Main. Volker was introduced to astronomy when he was 4 years old by his Grandmother who showed him the moon with a little refractor through an open window. Years later Volker came back to it when a friend was explaining some star constellations.
"I bought a typical Newtonian with 114mm diameter and because of my interest in daylight photography I attached a camera with a 50mm lens and 1000 ASA film to get a feeling about what was possible, shooting the night sky. On my very first film I recorded a very bright meteor and that image was published in a German book about astrophotography - that was the point of no return for me."
By the 1990's he was using a Celestron 8 and then a C-11 but still used them for film astrophotography. In the late 90's Volker bought a 15" astrograph Newtonian from Philipp Keller in addition to a 12" f/3 Deltagraph astrograph. These instruments pushed his results to new levels. In 1998 he founded the "Spiegelteam" together with two friends. Initially they did a lot of medium format B&W and LRGB film shooting with Technical Pan 6415. This started his experience with digital image processing with a lot of help from his mentor, Dr. Ernst Brodkorb. Then, in 2001, Volker bought a used ST-7E from Stan Moore.
"The use of that [ST-7E] camera combined with a AO-7 let me forget film material quickly. After a test period I got an ST-10XME in 2002 which I still use. Looking at the results the pioneers in CCD imaging published I started CCD imaging feeling that a new area in amateur astrophotography had begun . Having good equipment and some good processing skills from the film days helped me make a quick start into the new adventure called CCD."
Today, Volker's 15" Newtonian is set up in his backyard and he typically shoots with the ST-10XME at a focal length of 3000mm (0.47 arc seconds / pixel) with a custom made apochromatic barlow lens. Occasionally he shoots at 2000mm (0.7 arc seconds / pixel) with a Paracorr corrector. The instrument is on top of a heavy Alt-AD7 German equatorial mount. However, because of the weather in Germany and especially the light pollution in the area where Volker lives, he also travels for astrophotography. Many nights he has been out in the "Pfälzer Wald", the largest forest in Germany with some good dark places. He has also traveled to the Gornergrat in Switzerland where he can enjoy astrophotography at an altitude of about 3150 meters (~10,000 feet) surrounded by more than 20 mountains higher than 4000 meters (including the famous "Matterhorn"). In 1998, 2002 and 2004 Volker and Bernd traveled to Namibia to capture some of the Spiegelteam's best images.
"I got a lot of help in the beginning from Ernst Brodkorb, Germany, who gave me lots of experience in digital image processing. My Spiegelteam partner Bernd Flach-Wilken and his images in the 80s and 90s were always a pattern of what was possible for me. Stan Moore gave me a lot of interesting insight views in CCD photography."
Spiegelteam images have been published in ORION (Switzerland), Sterne und Weltraum (Germany), VdS-Journal (Germany), Interstellarum (Germany), Ciel et Espace (France), Sky and Telescope (USA), National Geographic (USA) among others. Several Spiegelteam images have been seen in SBIG's full page ads in Sky & Telesocpe, Night Sky, and Astronomy Magazine. Volker is also a member "Vereinigung der Sternfreunde," the largest amateur astronomy group in Germany. He has given talks at events in Germany, Austria and the United States. In 2004 he was a speaker at the Advanced Imaging Conference.
SBIG is proud to present our Award for Excellence in Astronomical Imaging to Volker 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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| Volker at his 15" with ST-10 and AO-7 | Bernd and Volker (Spiegelteam) in Namibia |
