here we may invite you to become a member of IAB (Amateur Association on Astrophotography). To become a member you should have got little experiences in the field of deep-sky photography or at least having special interest onto this fascinating field of amateur work. Besides you should have an sufficient amount of time to take part on our projects and excursions. This, for us, is much more important than to spend money for additional instrumentation. You should also live in our surroundings, that means in a radius of about max. 250 km from our hometown Bochum, to take physically part on our activities. If interested contact us please.

When I visited the Observatory 'Hoher List', I met the director, Prof. Geier. He gave me a phone number of IAB and so the contact took place. Beside widefield photography, I was infected with dobsonian fever after gazing the sky with some bigger scopes. I built a 18" Dobson and within the last years I went to some favourite astronomical places like Haute Provence (France) there Dany Cardons operates a 1-meter newton telescope, Gornergrat in the Swiss Alps, La Palma (Canarian Islands), Mauna Kea (Hawaiian Islands) and the observatories in the south-west of the USA.

In December 1990 a new era followed, when an SBIG ST-4 took over the guiding. At the end of December 1994 CCD imaging started with a Starlight SX CCD camera. Soon this will be upgraded with the MegaTEK ccd camera built by Frank Fleischmann, Fa. OES, Egloffstein, Germany with a Tektronix TK1024 AB MPP chip (1024 x 1024 pixel, 25 µm pixel size).

In 1981 he was foundation member of the "Astronomische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Wanne-Eickel / Herne e.V." who's chairman he is now since the end of 1998.This association serves the public observatory of Herne. A small planetarium (GOTO 5) does also belong to the observatory. The complex was erected by the members of the association in 1988-1991. From September to April Bernd runs the public observing sessions each Monday at 8 PM.

Bernd is also an eclipse chaser. After Finland, Mexico, Bolivia, Siberia, Curacao, Bulgaria southern Africa will be the next one in 2001.

Hello - the hell knows why, but You have chosen me. All right, her are the facts. Born in 1963 I visited elementary school from 1969 on. After six long years of junior high school I started a vocational training as optician and optometrist. During this period I got in contact with astronomy for the very first time - and it was fascinating! From the beginnings my interests spread in the fields of astronomical photography, cause photography has been one of my favorite hobbies since the last five years. Short time later I visited secondary school for three years and afterwards went to university in order to study physics. During that period I got much experience in taking images of deep-sky objects during different excursions which took me to such extraordinary astronomical places like La Silla Observatory in Chile ... Under perfectly dark skies I tried to go to the limit of deep-sky photography in color and also in B&W. As highlights images of the Gum-Nebula were taken with wide angle lenses (24 mm, f/1.4) and also with smaller angles of view in combination with H-II interference filters at exposure times up to 3 hours. Comet P/Halley was also a target of our efforts as it was the zodiacal light phenomena and the 'Gegenschein'.

From 1989 on I gave lessons in adult evening classes on astrophotography and practiced astrophotography of sun, moon and the planets with my class at the 5 m dome of our local public observatory in Bochum. The observatory also runs a public planetarium equipped with an 'old' Zeiss Model IV projector (will be changed in 2000) which spend space for about 330 persons. From time to time I work as an official in charge at our planetarium in presenting the main program. At the moment I am practicing a one year lasting training to become a computer specialist for data base management on IBM 390 and AS/400 machines.

In my very limited spare time I process the taken astronomical images in my home photolab by image enhancement techniques. This is replaced more and more by electronic image processing. Travailing is also one of my favorite desires, there mainly far destinations are objects of my aims, like it was the case in February 1998 at our total solar eclipse tour to Curacao. One of my latest projects is to become familiar with video astronomy, there we plan to record images of sun, moon and planets in real time with high frame rates (25 frames/s) in order to reduce seeing influences by adding selected single frames of good seeing to one high resolution image. This technique seems to be a bit related to the professional speckle technique. We will see how it works ... Last but not least I devoted myself to the maintenance of this homepage, which, of course, is done much more less than it should be. - Sorry for that !